Re: Proposed Modules, My Take

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 22:59:50 +0000, Mike Hearn <mike navi cx> wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:45:52 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > For certain values of "break". The application continues to work if the
> > application specifies a certain version of python, as it should. I wish
> > that python did not allow applications not to specify a version, but
> > it's not the first development environment to make it easy for people to
> > make mistakes. I think that Java needs the same attention.
> 
> You're using a pretty much unique definition of stability there: to most
> developers stability implies that it'll be OK to link old programs
> against future releases, for the foreseeable future. So GTK+ is stable.

By your definition, no it is not.  Apps linked against GTK+-1.x cannot
be linked against GTK+-2.x and expect to work.  Similarly for GTK+2.x
apps and GTK+-3.x whenever it is created.  GTK+-1.x is stable, and
GTK+-2.x is stable, and GTK+3.x will likely be stable whenever it is
ever created.  The reason that's good enough is that GTK+-1.x and
GTK+-2.x can be installed at the same time on a machine and an app can
use whichever one it wants.  This is a shade of stability that is good
enough in this circumstance.  What Murray is talking about is the
exact same thing for the bindings--it has a slightly different
timescale perhaps, but different shades of stability for different
problems.

Elijah