Re: [Libreoffice] consistent namespaces & future breakage ...

Hi Michael, Hi all,

On Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:02:06 +0100
Michael Meeks <michael.meeks@novell.com>
wrote:
>       Having said that - I think we probably want to have a
> flag-day at some stage perhaps a 4.0, and it is worth collecting
> things we want to do then, so we remember to do them all - I suggest
> having a tracker bug for that would be helpful. If we reconcile
> ourselves to breaking the plugin ABI (and API) incompatibly, and the
> necessity of re-compiling plugins for a next major version [ which
> seems to me to be sensible ], I guess there are a lot of things we'd
> like to have then:
>
> [... long list of snafus follows ...]

Agreed. Essentially you are proposing a new API version and to get rid
of all the known historic ugliness. I think we should start more
freeform on a wikipage before solidifying in the bug tracker at least
in the beginning, when the discussion is still very fluid. Otherwise we
would end up with endless bug splits and merges as the topics can be
highly interdependent.

>       Having said this - I think this sort of disruptive change
> belongs in a major version update, and I can't see it happening for
> the next year :-) [ but we should prolly plan a date for it so it
> does end up happening ]. There is never a good time
> back-compatibility breakage - but now is a particularly bad time for
> it I think :-)
>
>       And of course, we should extend the above list to cover all
> our pet hates that we can't currently fix IMHO.

I think that is the most important point. Esp. since sometimes we might
agree that the status quo is bad, but we might not (yet) agree on how a
better solution should look like. So we should create a wikipage now
discussing all possible changes and cooking it for at least one year.
That will ensure we have a plan once we get to this and:
a) that it has been discussed well enough by the bright minds on our
   project.
b) that people using the API see what is coming and can brace for
   impact.
c) Any flamewar about the implementation will have cooled down to
   slightly below one unit of "emacs vs. vi"
d) there will be no big OMGeverythingDifferent!!11! surprises.

Best,

Bjoern



-- 
https://launchpad.net/~bjoern-michaelsen