Keeping binary compatibility

[Andras Mantia]

On Saturday 02 October 2010, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> Thing is that nobody tells developers starting to work on some
> libraries that there's something like a soversion in libs. All our
> pages do is explain that kdelibs is guarantee'ing BC and what that
> means. So one thing that needs to be added to techbase is a section
> explaining what to do for libs in modules like kdegames, kdeedu etc.
> where they do want libs+headers installed for games in playround and
> extragear. When I hacked a bit on kdegames about 2 years ago (IIRC)
> nobody in the team really had an idea about soversion/bc guarantee's
> of the libs.

This is sad. Whoever starts to work on a public, shared library should 
be aware that it is not like writing an app. There are some rules to 
keep in mind, and one if the BC rules. What can we do? Well, document 
these rules on the techbase and use tools that detect BIC issues. Can't 
we integrated the abi-compliance-checker with krazy and send mails to 
the maintainers of those libs whenever a BIC change is detected?
 Similarly, we could add the BIC verifying step to the release checklist 
and hold back the release until the BIC change is reverted (for kdelibs 
or other libs guarantiing BC), or the SO name is increased. I think 
delaying a release and doing the extra check worths it to have a KDE 
environment that can be trusted by third party developers.

Andras
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