Re: Putting the 'Mono debate' back on the rails

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

On 7/21/06, Mike Kestner <mkestner novell com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-07-22 at 00:03 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
>
> >  * Should we include Gtk# in the Bindings suite?
> >   - the release management issues have largely been solved, aside from Gtk#
> >     not being split between Platform and Desktop (stable and unstable) APIs
> >     which is pretty important in terms of ISV/ISD communication and so on
>
> I have resisted this split, and I think the above statement gets to the
> heart of my issue.  There is this idea that it is not possible to
> guarantee API stability for bindings of Desktop libraries.  We (Gtk#)
> have made no stability exceptions for these APIs to our users.  That may
> seem insane to some.  It may make us jump through some additional hoops
> down the road, if the desktop developers choose to exercise their
> prerogative to break things.  However, it has not been an issue for us
> to this point.
>
> We bind six libraries that fall in the desktop set currently.  I cannot
> split out three of them because the APIs are included in gnome-sharp.dll
> currently, and to split them out would break API compat for my users.

Are you saying that parallel installation of libraries is impossible
in the mono world?  I don't see how this has to break API
compatibility for your current users.