[Portland] Project Portland, RuDI and the Generic desktop adapter

[nf2]

Martin Konold wrote:

>
>A broken ABI means bit headaches fro ISVs because they don't really know how 
>to solve it without breaking either old installations or shipping many many 
>versions of their product. According to what ISVs told me at the DAM ABI is a 
>real concern.
>
>
>  
>
I think the difficulty here is how to use the term "ABI problem":

A) Is it about breaking the low level "interface standard" of shared 
library interfaces (regardless of APIs).
B) Or does it also cover binary compatibility problems caused by 
changing APIs (function and struct signatures).

I always thought it was A, because B can be avoided through API 
discipline. For instance the "Generic desktop Adapter" tries to avoid B 
by only exposing basic libc types or types derived from them (and by 
using versioned structs of function pointers).

Cheers,
Norbert