db-compat

[Patrice Dumas]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 10:18:29AM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 
> Thus compat libraries represent a grace period for everyone to
> transition gracefully. That some ISVs do not want to understand this and
> wait till the grace period is over to realise they need to do some work
> is something you should take with those ISVs. Fedora/RHEL provided a
> grace period, they chose not to use it.

I completly disagree. Not everything needs to be rebuilt to work, compat
libraries are interesting when one wants to avoid to rebuild
applications when the application doesn't change. The other way is to
use static libraries, but this isn't more accepted in fedora.

An example is the numerical models. Once it is built, it is better not
to rebuild it. It may be adapted to the new API and rebuilt, of course,
but if this extra work can be avoided by providing a compat library, it
may be better. 

So if maintainers are ready to maintain compat library, let
them do it, it means that it is less work for them than a rebuild of the
application.

--
Pat