Although it is true that we are in a development phase now, we need to start being more careful about breaking changes. People are attempting to use our stuff now, and it is hard for them to keep up with our build rate. If we break things every week, we'll burn off our early testers, which would be bad.
I've asked for changes to avoid breakage in some reviews, but I forget sometimes, so I want to make a general request now. What I would like to see us do for the typical case is: - If people use the old API and it is easy to do, continue supporting it. - Change the docs to only mention the new API - Add a comment to http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=16356 reminding us to remove the deprecated API at 1.0 - When we send out the extension visible changes mail each week, mention the deprecated APIs in it To be clear, I'm not suggesting we should never break things at this point, just that in cases where it is easy to avoid breakage that we should do that. As an example, Matt recently renamed chrome.self to chrome.extension and just kept an alias at chrome.self. For Finnur's recent change to do extension-specific pageAction events, we could have continued dispatching all pageActions events through chrome.pageActions.onExecute if I would have thought to bring it up during review. As a counter-example, it would have been difficult to be backward compat when we implemented signing, so we specifically decided to bite the bullet and break everyone. At 1.0, we'll make a big sweep through and actually remove all these old APIs. - a --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Chromium Developers mailing list: [email protected] View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
