Re: Padding vfunc tables for less abi breakeage.

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Thu, 2005-01-06 at 21:56 -0500, Carl Nygard wrote:
> Well, another point is that now you're locking yourself into supporting
> all the old API, without a means to say "that was silly, we're not going
> to support that cruft anymore".  And if you do choose to deprecate or
> change API across minor numbers, then what was the point of the padding?

I don't understand how we get to this. We deprecate API when it gets
old. But we don't break it's ABI during a stable series as well. We
don't need to.

When we need to, we break ABI and do a parallel-installable version. I'm
thinking of doing this for gtkmm 2.8, but we probably don't have enough
little ABI changes to make it worthwhile.

> I guess the question is, what's more important, freedom to deprecate or
> binary compatibility.

We can, and do, have both.

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com