RE: Say goodbye to core X fonts

[Murray Cumming Comneon com]

> From: Jody Goldberg [mailto:jody gnome org] 
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2003 at 10:56:00AM +1200, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > 
> > 	Are you then effectively saying "although we said we 
> were going to be
> > fully ABI compatible we're breaking it now" ?
> > 
> > 	I'm not criticising, I'm honestly just curious as to 
> whether or not 
> > this breaks previous guarantees about ABI stability ...
> 
> An interesting question.  We've begun discussion on what ABI and
> API stability means (releng/policy/abi-stability-changes.txt).

When talking about ABI stability, just as with API, I think we sometimes
need to talk about _parts_ of the ABI. We can say that everything will be
ABI stable apart from an identified part. This means it would have been nice
to say earlier that the "core X fonts" part of the Pango ABI would be broken
between Pango 1.2 and Pango 1.4. Maybe we did.

We did a slightly similar thing in gtkmm 2.2 - We broke the clipboard ABI
compared to 2.0 because it was so broken that we were sure nobody was using
it.

Of course it's difficult to get this right.

Murray Cumming
murrayc usa net
www.murrayc.com