Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] gmenu, plugins and you

[Sean McNamara <smcnam gmail com>]

"End-users" aren't going to see the changes right away. The only
people who'll see the next release of RB any time soon are Fedora
Rawhide / Debian Sid / openSUSE Factory / ArchLinux users. These folks
are not your classical "end users" who faint when they see an error
message; very likely they know enough about GNU/Linux to at least
diagnose and file a good bug report, if not send you a patch. The REAL
end-users are running Ubuntu 12.04 / 12.10 almost exclusively these
days, with a periphery on things like Fedora stable, Debian stable,
RHEL, etc. Things are frozen for Ubuntu 13.04, so it'll be at least
until 13.10 (October 2013) before the truly helpless users see this
change.

It would be nice if commits could at least say something like [PLUGIN
API BREAK] in the commit message if it's going to break things that
most/all plugins use; but as it stands I don't see a whole lot of
users being inconvenienced by API breaks unless they (for some odd
reason) get immediately pulled into a stable and popular distro
release. As long as we (external plugin devs) notice these breaks
within a month or two of them being pushed in a stable release, we
should be able to protect a majority of our users from being impacted.

-Sean

On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 4:17 PM, David Mohammed <davidmohammed gmail com> wrote:
> Jonathan,
>
>   I would like to express my utter amazement and deep disappointment that
> you made this decision.
>
> From what I can see, there was no warning about this.  This really does
> break several very useful external plugins including my plugin CoverArt
> Browser.
>
> End-users do not understand why their favourite plugins fail to work when
> they upgrade.
>
> I fail to see how external devs are supposed to keep backward compatibility
> with older versions of Rhythmbox (for example v2.96 used on Ubuntu 12.04 for
> the next 4 years) as well as new versions of Rhythmbox v2.99.
>
>
> I thought the bad old days of constant API changes were over.
>
> Deeply disappointed - and at the moment, quite disillusioned :(
>
> David
>
>
>
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