followup regarding desktop specifications
George Kraft
gk4 at austin.ibm.com
Mon Aug 2 23:47:10 EEST 2004
>>/ How often does freedesktop.org specification team conference call, how
/>>/ often does the group meet?
/
>There is no team. People make proposals, they are discussed, if they are
>good they are implemented in the desktop.
That promotes extreme programming; however, it does not foster the development of a standards specification.
When does one lock down the descriptions of the APIs and structures? When can one produce an ABI from a stable
library? When can one write a conformance test suite from the specification, then validate the libraries?
Think of a standards specification as a legal contract between and software application and shared
services (ie., libgtk, libglib). One has to be overly detailed. For example, how can I get distros
A and B to reliably provide libfoo.so for my application? What if distro A patches or updates libfoo which
breaks my application? Who is right and who is wrong with respect to the stability of my application?
[The answer is the distro providing libfoo.so as specified by freedesktop.org, not the head of the CVS
branch. ;-) This discussion then leads you to library and symbol versioning, and the specification
defining the least common denominator of the libraries in use.]
George (gk4)
More information about the xdg
mailing list