KDE ABI stability?

[Josef Spillner]

El Domingo, 4. Diciembre 2005 18:47, Kevin Krammer escribió:
> Even more unfortunately this had a bad impact on KDE's credability, i.e.
> "our" Debian packagers stay on the safe side and force removal of
> applications linking to an older KDE version than the one being installed.

Assuming that the debian-kde people are at least aware of the policy, the 
default should be to only prevent such upgrades (or do removals) on a 
per-case basis, and then only until the ABI is fixed.
(I could imagine that for libraries such as libcvsservice, this won't cause 
too much trouble.)
It would be nice to have automated nightly symbol checking and API difference 
reporting. Where are the tools needed for this... :)

> Assuming that the bug was indeed a BIC change in libcvsservice, it could
> indicate that non-core developers are not aware of the binary compatability
> requirement or uncertain when a library has to be considered public.

If a library package installs header files, it is considered public.
I agree that a "kdelibs policy" document is still missing. For instance, the 
apidox policy mentions @since, but it is explained nowhere. Also, C++ 
specific BIC documentation should be linked from it, since it is often 
non-intuitive and contains a lot of legacy reasons to keep the actual source 
code such-and-such (i.e. not understandable by people who know languages that 
"just work" ;).

Josef