Re: About compatibility in GNOME 2 (was Re: Compatibility stuff)

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> writes:

> OK, so you still haven't explained why the app author can't put these
> two lines of code in a gtktransition.h, if they insist on this course
> of action. Then we don't create problems by adding API to GTK, users
> aren't forced to upgrade, it doesn't require a GTK release engineering
> cycle.

I didn't propose such a kind of action since I feel very bad about "polluting"
someone else's namespace.

I mean, before I can even make a patch which does this in a particular
application, I must be sure that you, the GTK+ team, will never at any
point in the future add these macros to GTK+ stable.

Because blindly #define'ing GTK_SOMETHING somewhere and assuming that
there'll never be a GTK+ relesae which #defines the same is a very
bad idea IMO.

So basically what I need to do here is to make a GTK+ patch which adds
these macros to GTK+, make sure that you refuse the patch and promise that
you will really never apply it at any time in the future.

> A diff between stable/unstable branches is going to be huge; the one
> between GTK 1.2 and GTK 2 is enormous. It's just inevitable. You
> shouldn't create all kinds of odd hacks to maximize the unmodified
> kLOC between branches. There are much more important things to worry
> about.

Well, the problem I see here is when development goes on in the stable
branch and only a few people are using HEAD. Then it'll be a huge pain
to have a large number of changes.

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin gnome org (private)
baulig suse de (work)