[SCM TRANSITION] Re: Proposal: move Randr protocol and library to git
Alan Coopersmith
alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Tue Apr 18 11:46:57 PDT 2006
Egbert Eich wrote:
> I think we are moving slightly of topic here - but: the ABI has been stable
> (modulo glitches) for 6 years. This sucked. Numerous problems we are facing
> today exist because of this paradigm. Decalring any ABI stable for such a long
> period of time seems to be *insane*.
Your insanity is Sun's business model, and X's reality. The libX11 ABI has
been stable much longer than 6 years - we can still run 15 year old X binaries
on Solaris today since while the libc & libX11 ABI's have grown, they haven't
broken existing applications. Maintaining ABI stability is only insane when
the ABI isn't designed to allow evolving it while maintaining compatibility -
the XFree86 module ABI is at least partway there with the versioning, but
clearly still has some holes that could have been better designed to allow
change without breakage.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
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