Sebastien Roy wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-07-28 at 13:26 -0700, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>
>> IMO, given the lack of documentation, and lack of any history of
>> interface Stability, I'd recommend making those interfaces Project
>> Private. Projects can still use those interfaces, but they'll need a
>> Contract to do so, which will allow this project to track their usage,
>> and work with them if future updates to the ghostscript libraries are
>> needed.
>>
>
> I disagree. All evidence points to this API being a Public API in the
> community already, there's no reason for it to be private here, and then
> complicate things further with contracts. My only suggestion would be
> to find a way to make the documentation more accessible (perhaps by
> creating a stub libgs man page that points to the API.htm file) to
> reflect the stability level of the API.
>
But we already have precedent for this with OpenSSL. A private API
which requires Contracts, even though its used by many many open source
projects. The reason for this is that OpenSSL upgrades have a track
record of breaking interfaces.
If the API is public enough that it has been documented (which was not
information that we had at the time I made the above comments), and has
some history of stability (even a little history), then the situation is
different. How stable is the interface? Is there any versioning?
- Garrett
> -Seb
>
>
>
