A brief note about recent API breaks in WebKitGTK+

[Xan Lopez <xan gnome org>]

Hi,

just a few comments about recent API breaks that have bothered some people.

- WebKitGTK+ (in its original form, *not* the WebKit2 stuff) is API
stable. This means we won't willingly break its API. This means if the
API breaks in a release it's not intentional, so asking us to notify
in advance d-d-l or whatever does not make much sense.

- All the recent breakage happened in the DOM bindings API. This API
is auto-generated from the DOM IDL files. This means we don't change
it directly, so if someone for whatever reason changes the IDL files
it could lead to some API break.

- Most of the DOM API is sort of stable, but some bits aren't.
Unfortunately it's hard to only ship the stable bits without going
through a lot of hoops, so in the end we ship in our bindings APIs
that could change. This does not happen often, but for some reason
there were 3 or 4 changes of this nature very recently.

- Ideally in the future we'll have some script that checks our API
against the last version and warns us about this kind of thing. This
is not done yet, so if someone wants to help us out this would be a
great task to get started.

- Finally, development releases exist in part to test things and catch
bugs like these. If you are going to get super angry when there's some
bug/mistake in one of those releases you might want to re-think your
involvement in free software development...

So:

- API breakage should not happen. For a series of reasons it's
possible that it could happen by mistake in our DOM bindings. If
that's the case remain calm and notify us, we'll fix it as soon as we
can.

Xan