breaking BIC for new addon libs in minor releases (was: Re: Goals? How are we doing?)

[Tom Albers]

Op dinsdag 06 mei 2008 18:46 schreef u:
> Am Dienstag, 6. Mai 2008, um 18:39 Uhr, schrieb Tom Albers:
> > Op dinsdag 06 mei 2008 18:30 schreef u:
> > > > I disagree. I think it is a must to be BC between minor releases.
> > > > If you want to be bic && public, go to extragear/libs untill you are
> > > > ready...
> > >
> > > What would this change for 3rd-party developers?
> >
> > You can make a release whenever you like and bump the major so version of
> > the lib as you like in each release.
> 
> That would be me, but I asked for 3rd-party developers.
> Then, I know I would not make releases independent of the KDE ones, because I 
> would develop the libs and the program together. So nothing would change for 
> 3rd parties, just another location.

The difference is that you have a proper versioning with library version numbers. 3rd party devels can check for that and adapt their code to those versions. 

I like to keep minor release from KDE BC and more importantly 3rd party devels should be able to rely on that.

> 
> > > For me it would be more work,
> > > as I would have development spanned between extragear/libs and kdeutils.
> > > And it would add an additional (if only soft) dependency between modules.
> >
> > No, as long as you make releases from the library, it's is just another
> > 'external' dependency. As long as it is not a cyclic dependency as we now
> > face with libkipi, it is not a problem.
> 
> We misunderstand each other?
> kdeutils/okteta would depend on extragear/libs/okteta. Now it does not.
> Think of the packagers. And checkouts of KDE's repository.

No. it is perfectly fine for a kdeutils app to depend on a library. If that happens to live in kde's svn too, that's fine.
It is up to you to keep the kdeutils app compilable to your latest release of the lib.

Toma