[ldb] Re: Moving basic libs to a new repo and release them as a separate package

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 23 February 2006 22:50, Gerald (Jerry) Carter wrote:
> tridge at samba.org wrote:
> > I'm guessing that Jeremy and Jerry would prefer to have their own copy
> > of talloc and tdb rather than automatically get any changes made by me
> > and others. If I'm wrong about that then please speak up :-)
>
> Tridge,
>
> Just a quick comment as I don't have a lot of time at the moment.
> We should eat out own dogfood.  I want tdb as a .so.  We cannot
> expect other projects to ever use our code if we aren't willing
> to provide a stable API and use it.  Same with talloc and ldb.

just to pipe up with a "me too": a stable API is a godsend for us in kde when 
seriously using ldb ... of course, we've got somewhere around a year before 
kde4 (the first version of kde that will ship with ldb based features) ships 
so there's certainly some road ahead which is good for everyone involved.

in KDE we guarantee "forwards compatibility" so any app binary built against 
version X.Y should run as-is against version X.(Y+N) where N>0. we do work 
with other libs that have unstable APIs but it's a bit of a nightmare to do 
so.

obviously APIs can evolve over time, but existing symbols must stay and our 
libs need to remain binary compatible. granted this is trickier with C++ than 
C =) we also tend to have product lifespans in the 5-7 year range.

so the more stable the libs we build on are, the happier we are and the 
happier our users are =)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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