Versioning interfaces

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Nov 14, 2005 at 08:36:46PM +0100, Tako Schotanus wrote:
> Havoc Pennington wrote:
> >On Mon, 2005-11-14 at 12:54 +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> >>b) Just tack a number onto the end of the interface name, getting
> >>   something like  'org.example.Music.Player2', 
> >>   'org.example.Music.Player3',
> >>   etc, etc.
> >
> >This is what most existing frameworks such as COM do fwiw. Another
> >convention is to put "X" in there, like "XPlayer" or "javax."
>
> Actually Microsoft wasn really sure how to do it and have changed their 
> mind several times duringg the lifetime of COM.
> 
> So you will see things like:
> 
> MSXML.DOMDocument2
> MSXML2.DOMDocument
> MSXML.DOMDocument.4.0
>
> and several other versions. Microsoft tends to add new interfaces either 
> with a number (like DOMDocment2) or with the Ex extension (DOMDocumentEx 
> for example) when they _add_ new functionality. The COM system had no 
> way of extending interfaces with new backward compatible methods!

If we go for interface renaming, then when adding details on to the spec, we 
ought to put in a recommendation about a preferred scheme for naming interfaces 
with version numbers, to give at least the appearance of consistency :-)

Dan.
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