DCOP interface in kicker broke compatibility?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 02 February 2005 10:46, George Staikos wrote:
>    I think the backwards compatibility of DCOP interfaces is more important
> than even binary compatibility of our libraries.  It's not like there are
> many real commercial, binary-only applications out there using kdelibs.

commercial apps are not the only reason for maintaining library API 
compatibility. every third party application developed relies on a stable API 
in our libraries, open or closed. the open source apps can be adapted to 
change more easily, but chasing APIs isn't desirable. so, no, i don't think 
that DCOP interfaces are more important than our library compat efforts.

> On 
> the other hand, there are many scripts and tools using DCOP. Changing the
> interface breaks those apps. 

changing library APIs break apps that rely on them, too. it's not any 
different, or worse, in that sense; the difference, however, is that 
enforcing IPC interface compat impacts application developers and puts a 
greater burden on them. it also treats all applications and all IPC calls 
with equal weight, something we don't even do for libraries (where we 
differentiate between "public" libraries and "private" or "unstable" APIs).

which is why i believe it to be worthwhile to examine when, where and how IPC 
interface compatibility should/must be maintained. keeping IPC compat can be 
a good thing, but not across the board.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
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