What this really means is that any GRE-based app (or XPCOM component) that only uses FROZEN interfaces will be fully compatible with any future versions of the GRE.
Problems arise when an application makes use of non-frozen interfaces, or when an application is run against a version of the GRE that is older than the one it was compiled against.
For example, some functions were added to the XPCOM glue library for Mozilla 1.5 and Mozilla 1.7. Applications (or XPCOM components for that matter) that are compiled against the Mozilla 1.7 GRE might not work correctly in Mozilla 1.6 or may even cause Mozilla 1.6 to crash. We have some work to do to provide better versioning controls.
-Darin
John A. wrote:
Does the various versions of the GRE include backwards compatibility information in their installations?
I'd love to see GRE-based apps have the ability to detect which compatible versions are already installed and offer to use one of them if available, defaulting to the latest compatible version. It should be manageable by including info in the GRE as to how far back it's backward compatible.
For instance: App. A is written to work with GRE 1.6. The user has Mozilla 1.8 already installed, then installs App. A. The installer for App. A automatically checks currently installed GREs and finds that the 1.8 GRE claims to be backwards compatible with 1.6, so instead of installing the 1.6 GRE, the installer uses the existing 1.8 version.
The ability to switch an installed app to use a newly installed compatible GRE version would be nice too. Maybe with a standard utility that comes with the GRE?
I think all the above would help reduce system overhead, shortening launch times when more than one GRE-based app is running, and increasing system performance & stability.
Is this something that's already in there or in the works? Thanks!
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