Re: Proposed Modules, My Take

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

> > > the sense that you can send somebody a binary package and expect 
> > > it to work (which is the whole point of stability, right?):
> On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 09:19 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > This is your own definition of ABI stability.
> 
> It's the industry standard definition used by Microsoft, Sun, Apple and
> indeed GNOME.

I've developed a lot of software for Windows, and I've almost never been
able to install it without installing extra development-platform stuff,
spending weeks with InstallShield.

This has become slightly easier if you just target old stagnated APIs
like MFC which have propagated everywhere now (though they did a new
parallel-install version of that recently for MSVC++ 7, so it wouldn't
be enough to have v7 if you wanted v6), but those are not the APIs
developers use now anyway, because they are no longer getting important
API additions.

SUN's definition of ABI stability is a great deal more complex, allowing
for various types of guarantees, as we've heard recently.

I agree that such a platform would be good. I believe it means that
distros must continue to ship old versions, and distros should be
consistent. Then a phrase like "I have GNOME 2.10" would have some
meaning across all distros. That's difficult. I really do believe that
distros need to care about this.

I don't believe that stagnation (never ever doing new parallel-install
versions) is the way to get there. 

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com