Re: Interface Stability in GNOME

[Ryan McDougall <NQG24419 nifty com>]

On Thu, 2004-23-12 at 00:36 +0000, Andrew Sobala wrote:
On Wed, 2004-12-22 at 17:18 -0700, Elijah Newren wrote:
> > Absolutely.  I started to gather this information at one point to put
> > into my tutorial
> > (http://www.gnome.org/~newren/tutorials/developing-with-gnome/html/ch05.html#library-overview),
> > but I fear part of the information I had may have been wrong and I
> > wasn't able to get a full listing (well...got too distracted by
> > hacking on Metacity to do it).  I really did want to list each library
> > as stable or unstable, as much for my own information as for putting
> > it in the guide for others.
> 
> As an aside, I think the most useful categorisation is probably
> Stable/Unstable/Private. So
> GDK/GTK/ATK/Pango/GConf/gnome-vfs/libbonobo*/ORBit2 are Stable (surely
> anything in the Developer Platform should be stable?),
> libgnome-keyring/gstreamer etc. are Unstable, and
> libwnck/libegg/eel/gal/libgnome-desktop etc. are Private.
> 

I was just thinking to myself is its not simpler and more flexible to
define a two dimensional metric: Stable/Unstable, Public/Private, with
Obsolete as a nice singular point. With all those points being relative
to ISVs.


Brian,

I just wanted to second recommendations that you proceed with discussing
some concrete patches. Discussing theory with this lot will keep you
going in circles all day. ;)

Off the top of my head:

-first patch gtk-doc to support the interface metrics, and announce that
not using it is considered a bug

-get gtk-doc to categorize the output by metric (ie Stable Public at the
top, Unstable Public next with a nice big warning that it may change at
specific times, then Private etc with a nice big warning against using
private interfaces, etc)

-get gtk-doc to create graphs that allow the developer to chart the
functional relationships between modules (hey EVERYONE loves diagrams!)
Basically anything that is useful than can be squeezed form the
metadata.

Anyone else think of concrete ideas for Brian?


> Hope that helps,
 
Me too.


Cheers,
Ryan