I meant to also clarify that it also says:
API breaking changes can be made to experimental features.
So below email only applies to things that aren't considered experimental
features.
From: iotivity-dev-bounces at lists.iotivity.org
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dave Thaler via
iotivity-dev
Sent: Monday, April 3, 2017 2:02 PM
To: iotivity-dev at lists.iotivity.org
Subject: [dev] Don't make breaking changes
I would like to remind all contributors of the guidance on
https://wiki.iotivity.org/platform_support which was posted to the list last
year and has been on the wiki ever since.
Specifically this part:
A core feature is supported on all fully-supported platforms, where (at the
time of an IoTivity release) it:
...
* Can have API additions but not breaking changes across releases
This is about public API surface area, which are APIs in .h files that are not
under an "/internal" subtree.
Such .h files should be copied to the out/ directory by the build, and it is
not appropriate to change API prototypes,
or to mess with existing structs, in a way that makes changes since the last
major release that would affect apps.
So for example, if a shared library is built by the iotivity build, then any
app that links with it should continue to work.
Similarly, any app that (say) declares a struct on the stack in its own code,
should similarly continue to work
(changes in struct size and field offsets are breaking changes). I've been
seeing changes to prototypes and structs
that could cause problems with existing apps even if they and iotivity are both
recompiled.
Given the lack of objection last year, I wanted to remind people since people
seem to be ignoring it.
The alternative is to say that IoTivity 1.3 is not backwards compatible for
apps and people should not be writing any apps yet.
Since there's no API maintainer, I'm bringing this up as platform support
maintainer since the platform support guidelines
have included API support guidelines.
If folks have issues, please discuss.
Dave
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