Calling for a new openSUSE development model

Posted Jun 19, 2012 14:22 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Calling for a new openSUSE development model by rahulsundaram
Parent article: Calling for a new openSUSE development model

unless you want to never ever break ABI compatibility which I think is a unreasonable expectation for anything higher up than say glibc.

Why not? X11 did it. Furthermore, with symbol versions it's not even hard to do.

to post comments

Calling for a new openSUSE development model

Posted Jun 19, 2012 21:33 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

Because higher up layers make mistakes which they dont want to be struck with forever. If it was trivial, everyone would be doing it already.

Calling for a new openSUSE development model

Posted Jun 20, 2012 16:12 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses)

I wouldn't ask them to be stuck with their mistakes forever, as long as they honour the proper sequencing of "create new; deprecate old; discard old". Some projects tend towards conflating "create new" and "discard old" into a single step. This is an understandable temptation, but one that should, as a general rule, be resisted by anyone working on a project that has (and wants to keep) actual users outside the project.

Calling for a new openSUSE development model

Posted Jun 20, 2012 17:44 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

This is how popular libraries like glib do development. I was just noting that the "discard old" step is a ABI break.