On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Richard Ryniker<ryniker at ryniker.ods.org> wrote: >> a frontend that asks for new, unsupported features, will simply >> get an appropriate error code. > > Allen Noah, earlier in this thread (Thu Jun 11 19:08:28 UTC 2009) alluded > to the problem with this approach when he wrote: > >>bah- then no front-end will use it, since it is not guaranteed to be >>there.
<snip> > I believe SANE, like many other applications, will find it better to change > its API in infrequent, discrete steps than to follow a "continuous change > is permitted" strategy. Well, you can't get much more infrequent API changes than SANE :) Seriously, we have to bump the major number on the soversion to do any changes. The only real question is what do we do with all the unmaintained backends? 1: drag them along via modification 2: leave them behind and make the frontends link against sane1 and sane2 3: leave them behind and use a sane-compat meta-backend to make them appear to have the sane2 api 4: make our API modifications small enough that old backends will be forward compatible Note that all 4 of these options are easier for the programmer if the API changes are kept small. Are there any other choices? allan -- "The truth is an offense, but not a sin"
