D-BUS API and ABI (was: Re: ANNOUNCE: D-Bus - 0.31 released)

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Tue, 2005-03-08 at 10:17 +1100, Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 04:43:51PM -0500, John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> > Get it while its hot.  Be on the bleeding edge.  D-BUS 0.31 has been
> > released featuring a much cleaned up API and fantastic new type system
> > along with updated python, mono and glib-bindings.  This is an unstable
> > release pit stop on the road to 1.0.  Make your apps compatible or be
> > left in the dust.
> 
> Just out of curiousity, what's the status of 0.31 with regards to the
> ABI?  0.23.1, at least (a point release!) broke the ABI by removing
> a function (renaming it), and didn't bump the soversion -- everyone
> with stuff built against libdbus who used that symbol had to rebuild.
> And it silently broke, because packaging systems don't take ABI changes
> without soversion bumps into account.
> 
> Which is a shame, because that's a *point* release, so I was really
> hoping to be able to integrate it, especially for all the Mono fixes.
> 
> Despite the fact that D-BUS is still in beta and all that, there's still
> a published library, and lots of people still use that.  And the API
> cleanup is worthy, but can we please batch the entire lot for one big
> cleanup in a later release where we can bump the major soversion?  I
> mean, D-BUS as it stands is unpackageable.  And while it's nice to say
> that it's in beta, that doesn't make apps like HAL, Beagle, etc, just
> magically go away.
> 
> Also, breaking API in point releases is generally considered poor form.
> 
> -d

Well, it has been stated in the past that API/ABI stability would not be
on the plate until 1.0.  That being said I made it easy to bump the
sonames in configure.in and have done so for this release.  Note that
this release massively breaks API/ABI from the 0.2x series but is
considered to have most if not all of the major changes that will be in
the 1.0 release. 

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri
Associate Software Engineer
Desktop Group
Red Hat, Inc.
Blog: http://martianrock.com