deprecation?

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

I wholeheartedly agree with Murray here.  We should not

a) threaten to remove stable ABI;
b) remove stable ABI, violating our stability guarantees;
c) make ANY deprecation announcement to the external developer community 
before suitable replacements have been made available and given soak time.

Bill

> However it's very easy to interepret that paragraph as "they are no longer
> supported", so let's change the wording at least.
>
> "We expect to deprecate these modules in a future version of GNOME when we
> have suitable replacements for them. However, their ABI will never be
> broken." might be simpler.
>
> And anyway, we don't really "support" anything - we just don't break the
> ABI, and we let various companies support them. "Support" would imply that
> someone can come to us with a libbonoboui problem and expect a guarantee
> of it being fixed.
>
> However, I'm personally against making non-official official statements
> that just spread doubt. An API is either deprecated or it's not. Anything
> else should just be talk on a mailing list, and not an official statement
> of API stability. This is also the opinion of the SUN guys who are
> currently continuing privately (unfortunately) the API/ABI-stability
> conversation.
>
> Murray Cumming
> murrayc murrayc com
> www.murrayc.com
> www.openismus.com