Re: platform compatibility policy

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Colm Smyth <Colm Smyth ireland sun com> writes:

> Hi Maciej,
> 
> I'm very much in favour of a clear version compatibility policy.
> I apologize in advance for what will be a longish mail on this
> subject, I would welcome more discussion about this.

Colm,

Actually, I really appreciate your comments. I know Sun has a strong
track record on compatibility issues.
 
> I'd like to clarify a point relating to public vs. private
> interfaces and also to make some suggestions about the
> differences beween source and binary-level compatability
> and how to prevent accidental breaks to interfaces.
> 
> 
> First of all, I believe that source and binary compatability 
> should only be required for stable *public* interfaces.  
> 

I absolutely agree. This policy is intended to apply only to libraries
that are part of the GNOME development platform, and only for public
interfaces of those libraries, i.e. ones for which they install
headers.

There is a worry here that libraries that are not part of the devel
platform (either because they are GPL or intentionally marked
"internal use only" or whatever) would mistakenly be used
unintentionally if they install headers. Maybe we should have these
libraries insteall headers ina distinguished location
($(includedir)/gnome-internal maybe?) to avoid people using these
private but shared interfaces accidentally.


> If an interface is wholly private to an application (e.g.  some
> functions in a library that are shared by two closely related
> programs, where those functions will never be needed elsewhere in
> GNOME), then there is no need to maintain compatability over releases.
> 
> Also, if an interface is effectively an early-access technology
> (say a brand-new library) but it is shipped with a major release of
> GNOME (such as 2.0), it should not be required to be stable, but
> anyone who uses that library needs to know that they are using
> something that is rapidly evolving.

This sounds great too.
 
> If there is any interest in such a tool for GNOME, I can contact
> the team at Sun responsible for AppCert to see if they
> could contribute the AppCert tool-set to open-source
> for use in the GNOME project.
> 

That would be a great contribution.

Thanks,

Maciej

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