kde-baseapps dependency on kdelibs changed in 4.9 branch?

[David Jarvie]

On Tue, September 11, 2012 4:33 pm, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 4:42 PM, Dawit A <adawit at kde.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 10:08 AM, Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> El Dimarts, 11 de setembre de 2012, a les 09:51:22, Dawit A va
>>> escriure:
>>> > On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 6:27 AM, Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org>
>>> > wrote:
>>> > > It seems that the
>>> > >
>>> > > set(KDE_MIN_VERSION "4.7.97")
>>> >
>>> > Was that done intentionally or was it forgotten to be updated for the
>>> > KDE
>>> > 4.9 release ? If the former, then have we now started guaranteeing
>>> > forward
>>> > compatibility too ?
>>>
>>> It was done on purpose. Why require newer kdelibs when you don't need
>>> them.
>>
>>
>> Because you really don't know that you need them until you actually do ?
>> Like I said bug fixes and regressions sometimes require changes in
>> kdelibs.
>> If we purposefully shackle ourselves to forward compatibility then such
>> bugs
>> and regressions, no matter how bad, cannot be fixed until the next major
>> release. If that is acceptable for the sake of being forward compatible,
>> then that is fine. However, I really do not see the point of it. Why
>> would
>> anyone want to use new version of applications with the older version of
>> the
>> required libraries ?
>
> Because upgrading libs is not always easily possible. Thats not so
> much an issue with kde-baseapps since those are really basic things
> and probably only few people build those without also building
> kdelibs. For any other apps people might be using binary packages for
> the base stuff which are one or even two releases behind current
> stable and they'd still like to work on apps from master. And I think
> its important to support these people if possible. So keeping
> backwards compatibility.
>
> Also this is not about being forward compatible, but having apps be
> backwards compatible with older kdelibs. Forward compatibility of
> kdelibs is mostly given anyway due to the promises of keeping BC and
> SC of existing API and only adding (and hopefully also keeping
> existing behaviour).

If someone runs with an older version of kdelibs, they should realise that
that version may contain some bugs which are fixed in later versions. So
if they build an up-to-date application against that kdelibs, it's at
their own risk to some degree.

But if it helps some developers to do their work, it is surely a good
thing to provide (via #ifdef or whatever) backwards compatibility to
applications.

-- 
David Jarvie.
KDE developer.
KAlarm author - http://www.astrojar.org.uk/kalarm