bonobo-activation API freeze status

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

Hi everyone,

bonobo-activation-0.9.0 Can be considered essentially API frozen for
GNOME 2.0. There are, however, a few minor changes which affect API
and compatibility that I am still considering. I believe they will not
have a huge effect on application porting, but feel free to let me
know if I am wrong. I will file bugs for all of these changes shortly
in Eazel bugzilla.


* Change the install location for .server files from
$(datadir)/bonobo-activation to either
$(datadir)/bonobo-activation/servers or $(datadir)/bonobo/servers to
avoid colliding with potential future files that bonobo-activation may
want in it's pkgdatadir. This technically does hot affect API but
definitely affects all apps and libraries in a significant way.

* Split Bonobo_ActivationContext.idl into at least 3 IDL files:
Bonobo_Activation.idl, which has the public enumeration and struct
types that are exposed in the bonobo-activation C API,
Bonobo_ActivationContext.idl which defines the ActivationContext
interface, and Bonobo_ObjectDirectory.idl which defines the
ObjectDirectory interface. This is all private IDL, but currently
Bonobo_ActivationContext.h is installed and required by some public
headers, which means apps are #including internal implementation
details of bonobo-activation. So after this change,
Bonobo_Activation.h will be installed and considered fully public, and
the other two headers will not be installed. Basically this comes down
to hiding details that were never meant to be public in the first
place and should have no real affect on libraries or apps. It might
have a tiny effect on libbonobo and the way it builds the type library
for the Bonobo:: namespace.

* Possibly add a special compatibility API for activating oaf servers
via bonobo-activation. This is needed for things like GConf that want
to work with both the GNOME1 and GNOME2 worlds. However, I think it
may be sufficient to just take oaf from GNOME 1.x and port it to glib
and ORBit2, and do nothing else, to achieve this. In the future, of
course, we'll need a better solution since we can's just rename the
activation framework with every major release. :-)

Regards,

Maciej