Re: Changes needed for "LibreOffice 4"

On Friday 20 of July 2012, Thorsten Behrens wrote:
> Lubos Lunak wrote:
> >  Hmm. That makes it something we should take into consideration then, but
> > that consideration may be quickly over with saying that it's internal API
> > and as such we don't care about people who abuse it.
>
> There's more nuance required here I think. Substantial use of
> "unstable" API still leaves us with noticeable repercussions on the
> extension ecosystem, that we might want to have *once*, and not
> spread over multiple releases.

 Even if people actually do use our internal APIs, that doesn't mean we have 
to leave it that way. And that does not necessarily mean hiding it 
intentionally. If we are going to make the effort to keep those APIs stable, 
we may as well just make them public.

 And, in general, if it's likely that some internal APIs might be used from 
the outside, then we should consider a way of avoiding that. If it's 
internal, somebody is going to change it somewhen. So we should hide it, or 
maybe somehow visible mark it as such and add "if you find this useful, 
contact us about about it public", or so. Being afraid to change internal 
interfaces just because somebody from the outside might be using that is just 
lame (incidentally, that's another thing I have experience with).

-- 
 Lubos Lunak
 l.lunak@suse.cz