On Tue, Jan 16, 2001 at 01:18:00AM -0800, Brendan Eich wrote:
>
> I don't speak for netscape.com, but I'll say what all staff and drivers
> @mozilla.org know: being a system library on many distros is a victory
> condition, and it requires API freezes and a decent versioning story.
yay!
> We're working on the API freeze part, and still limping along on COM's
> versioning story. Suggestions?
>
*yes*: don't sweat it. forcing implementers to freeze interfaces once the
magic ship-date has arrived, and then to support both old interfaces and any
new ones added later ... is one of the worst lies perpetrated by
Booch/Grady/Gamma/etc...
Mozilla has some real advantages in any case: when an API changes and breaks
your code, you can go read the cvs logs and find the culprit. If developers
changing interfaces make a point of meaningful commit messages and useful
comments in headers (including *use* comments), I think developers who
depend on mozilla as a library will be willing to simply fix stuff as it
breaks. That -- and clean ability to install multiple highly-incompatible
versions -- has been the development reality on sane platforms for years.
Speaking for myself I'd rather fix against a living library than try to rely
on a "frozen" implementation that's dead/unmaintained.
Multiple simultaneously installed versions (i.e. major version numbers on
shared libraries) are key :)
my $0.02.
ari
