Re: ARC & GNOME [Was: How we make decisions...]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 19:27 +1300, Glynn Foster wrote:
> 
> > I've seen a number of references to concerns about interface stability
> > from Sun; I'm curious what the examples are. 
> 
> We're not just talking about library interfaces here. We're also talking
> about binary names, file locations, file formats, package names, ... you
> name it. I think GNOME has done a pretty decent job for library
> stability [1], but the other stuff we've not been so good with.
> 

Right, that makes sense. I believe this is primarily a QA problem fwiw.
I don't think process will help. What will help is tools for tracking
the stuff, and people filing bugs and making noise about them.

A lot of this we just aren't going to consider public interface, though,
FWIW.

> [1] The only breakages we're seeing on our side from 2.0 were from
> libgnomeprint* and a single API or so that we introduced before the
> multihead GTK+ got upstream

Right, and libgnomeprint wasn't public API at that time iirc, or at
least should not have been, and the gtk thing is an object lesson in the
problem with non-upstream patches ;-)

I think we should be rapidly converging on the point where the public
API is "GTK plus dependencies" which is much simpler to explain.

Right now the Red Hat to ISV recommendation is "GTK+, GConf,
libgnomeprint, libgnomeprintui, and libglade"

Havoc