API problems (Was: future versions)

[Harri Porten]

On Fri, 6 Feb 2004, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:

> and, fwiw, i don't buy the "maturity" statement that pops up now and
> then. some areas were not touched for years simply because nobody cared
> enough and felt up to the task. but that does not mean that the stuff is
> in a good shape. if you measure kde's api cleannes by qt standards,
> you'll find a picture not exactly to our favour, even with the current
> qt api, which matthias found to be sooo bad. ;)
> if changing that means annoying the poor application developers - too
> bad - for them.

The "poor application developer" is almost the only who counts. Libraries
shouldn't be an end in itself. They are just helpers to reach to the goal
of writing an applications.

While I value a clean library design very high I think that you can only
go that far without hurting the overall cause. Simply leaving old classes
intact for compatibility and adding new classes with a different name is a
way to help in case of drastic redesign for example.

Harri.