Broken Binary Compatibility in 3.1.0

[George Staikos]

On Tuesday 11 February 2003 15:50, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Tuesday 11 February 2003 01:05, George Staikos wrote:
> > - Renaming modules that are loaded by others (like KControl module names!
> > Yes this happened, and broke 3rd party applications!)
>
> hrm... i wasn't aware that the names of kcontrol modules were guarenteed to
> remain constant, nor was it mentioned in any of the discussions around the
> (many) changes made (by many people) ... is this documented somewhere?

   If you publish it, people will use it.  There are already apps that call 
kcontrol modules to let users configure settings after installation.  If we 
don't want people to use something, we have to document it clearly as such.  
Then again, I don't know how we could say:

"kcmshell <modulename> is not supported for third party use as it will change 
from release to release.  Instead, please use kcontrol and then ask the user 
to select the appropriate module."

  We change kcontrol layout every release it seems.  That's not acceptable at 
all.

> > (without breaking the new names too).  Third party apps that run
> > "kcmshell <modulename>" are the ones in question, not what the user sees
> > in the KControl GUI.
>
> what is an accepted use of launching kcontrol modules directly via kcmshell
> from third party applications? i can understand programs doing this if the
> control panel belongs to that application, but am curious about these third
> party apps and which panels are relied on by third party apps...
>
> given the rather non-static nature of kcontrol (one panel has already
> disappeared in HEAD since 3.1), would it be better to encourage a more
> dynamic method of launching KDE control panels akin to the startServiceBy
> methods?

  Sure but we don't have it right now so you can't break it on people.  And 
furthermore, if you change the name of the service, even startServiceBy isn't 
going to work. :)

-- 

George Staikos