Re: Enforce some restrictions on unstable APIs in the desktop release? (Was: gok broken with new libwnck)

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Alexander Larsson wrote:

> ...
>
> I often change eel after the freeze in order to fix bugs in nautilus.
> But I see the point in this, and its not a bad idea. How about limiting
> it a bit though, so that after API freeze such libraries aren't allowed
> to do api-incompatible changes.
>
> This means you can still add functions, and in the libwnck case we have
> here you could have added the new function, and then made the old one
> call the new one. (This would require a new name for the function of
> course, but at least you could fix the bug.)
>  
This makes sense to me.  I also think it might be reasonable to time 
such an API freeze a couple of weeks after developer-API-freeze (i.e. 
about the same time as Beta 1), if folks think the 'wiggle room' between 
platform-API-freeze and beta can be useful.

Making changes to exported API after beta seems high-risk in any case.

- Bill