Feature Proposal: Rolling Updates (was Re: WHY I WANT TO STOP USING FEDORA!!!)

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Wed Feb 11 22:10:30 UTC 2009


On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Mikkel L. Ellertson
<mikkel at infinity-ltd.com> wrote:
> It sounds like your example is the exception to the rule.

I'm pretty sure we went through the same sort of thing early on in the
d-bus process in previous Fedora releases before D-bus announced API
stability. And we are going to go through it again as new libraries
are introduced and application start trying to use them before they
are API stable.  These maybe exceptions..but you can't reasonable
predict which ones will be exceptions and which ones will not be
because we don't have a way to track which projects adhere to API
stability best practises.

My point is this.. you can't know whether an individual library claims
API stability or not without checking with the upstream project as to
whether its unstable. I very much doubt right now at this very moment
tell me which accuracy which libraries projects claim to have a stable
stable and which libraries do not claim api stability.   There isn't
anything like a coherent SDK specification that would even attempt to
summarize which libraries try to provide a stable API for application
developers and which do not.

You can throw darts, and hope. But you can't really know.  There is no
enforcement, nor guarantee, or any summary information at all which
can be pointed to to tell you that particular library project is
expected to be following the best practise soname rule. The only
expectation you have is past performance..and that's a poor
expectation generator. If a library project hasn't made API stability
a communicated feature, your banking on your projected assumptions
about the developer's interest in API stability.

-jef




More information about the fedora-list mailing list