DCOP interface in kicker broke compatibility?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 02 February 2005 02:08, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> Yes, and I think that's where the burden is supposed to be. The alternative
> is that the end-user has to carry the burden. I don't think that's the
> right place if KDE wants to establish itself and its applications as a
> professional environment.

certainly; but saying "all IPC calls must be maintained going forward" is, 
IMO, more burdon than necessary on application developers. application 
development should not be overly burdensome, otherwise we discourage use of 
IPC (or encourage breaking with our policies). which is why i think there 
needs to be a middle ground where it's possible say, "This set of calls are 
part of a public interface that cary with them a guarantee of maintenance, 
these calls don't."

the possible downside is the "lazy" app developer who just marks all their IPC 
calls as "subject to change"  to avoid having to plan properly and maintain 
compat. at least the user gets to know this.

and for that reason i also see defining standard IPC interfaces as becoming 
more important since it would give something for application developers to 
conform to that's external to their application, while also allowing users of 
those interfaces (which may be end users, sys admins or other developers) the 
ability to write to the interfaces rather than the individual apps. already 
we have a couple of such interfaces in CVS, but making such things a stated 
goal and setting up some guidelines for how to go about creating, defining 
and standardizing such interfaces would encourage further interface 
standardization.

this also touches on documentation / introspection capabilities that you 
mentioned elsewhere in this thread.......

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