future of ABIs (was Re: [gst-devel] amarok)

[Benjamin Otte]

Quoting Christian Schaller <uraeus at linuxrising.org>:

> Well if we are comparable to a widget tookit I don't see why we can't
> work like GTK+ works, who manages to maintain ABI compatability accross
> releases. Why can't we to just add new API and deprecate old ones like
> GTK+ do, but not actually remove the old API's before we are ready to do
> a major version number switch?
> 
You know, Gtk is at version 2.x already. There's a whole desktop using Gtk. I 
certainly think they know by now how the core should work.
OTOH GStreamer is at version 0.8. I can count the number of serious GStreamer 
using applications on one hand. I certainly have no clue how an API for a 
media framework should look.

Add to this that Gtk is still deprecating a lot of API which is a pain to 
support even with the 10 developers they have. (They're quite late with the 
current release.)

They're certainly far better off.

Benjamin