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

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> writes: 
> What we don't care about is forwards compatibility - I'm strongly of
> the opinion that when you are experiencing the pain of porting to
> GTK+-2.0, you should not have to simultaneously worry about backwards
> compatibility with all the brokenness that was in GTK+-1.2.
> 

Just to be sure no one takes this out of context someday in the
future, we DO care about forward compat within the stable series
(1.2.x), just not between stable and unstable.

(Where forward compat means an app developed against a newer version
still works with an older version.)
 
> P.S. - A final note is that all library maintainers need to make
>        a clean separation for another reason: a hard-and-fast
>        requirement for GNOME-2.0 is that any library that was
>        part of the GNOME-1.4 platform must at least support 
>        simultaneous runtime installs with the old libraries.
>        (And that means not just the .so files, but all other 
>        associated data.) Simultaneous compile time environments,
>        as GTK+ has would be very desirable as well, of course.
> 

pkg-config makes it easy to do even the compile-time compat.

Havoc