Re: seeking advice

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 19:59 -0500, muppet wrote:
> On Mar 29, 2005, at 7:16 PM, Jeff Morgan wrote:
> 
> > I am seeking advice on how to address a reported bug.  In
> > our MouseEvent class we have a constant defined as TRIPPLE_CLICK.
> > Clearly the correct spelling should be TRIPLE_CLICK.  Since this
> > constant is public it is part of our public API.  In order to correct
> > this mispelled variable I would need to break API stability.  What
> > would be the prefered approach to address such a change?
> 
> Some time ago, we discovered that gtk2-perl 1.000 was released with 
> GtkScrollbar incorrectly bound as Gtk2::ScrollBar.  We changed the 
> spelling to Gtk2::Scrollbar in 1.010 (the next unstable series), and 
> aliased the old names to the new ones to keep from breaking existing 
> code.  Something similar happened for Uint => UInt sometime later; the 
> library always returns UInt, but allows either Uint or UInt as input.
> 
> For a constant such as TRIPPLE_CLICK, i'd suggest aliasing the old name 
> to the new name, and hiding the old name from the documentation (or at 
> the very least deprecating it).  Is there a technical reason this 
> wouldn't work for you?  (e.g. can't have duplicate enumeration values 
> or something like that)

Yes. API addition, plus deprecation of the old API, is the way to do
this.

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