Re: [Libreoffice-qa] minutes of ESC call ...

On 25.11.2016 11:26, Bjoern Michaelsen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Nov 24, 2016 at 07:02:17PM +0000, Michael Meeks wrote:
> >      Personally I think Markus' take - that we shouldn't be using UNO API
> > for this internal stuff is spot-on - push the API problem to the edge:
> > but others have different views =)
>
> FWIW, up to this point we made no distiction between how we handle published
> and unpublished interfaces. Maybe now that we have had some cleaning up
> published interfaces, it might be the time to reconsider making the barrier to
> API break between those two more explicit[1].
>
> Just a thought -- while I know that we (well, OpenOffice) initially
> overpublished APIs, I dont know if we handled it more sensible since then, if
> there is any value at all in the "published" tag again at this point.

well there are 2 problems with this:

1) as you mention the "published" tag was introduced > 10 years ago by
   just tagging every single IDL file that existed at the time, so we
   have "overpublished" interfaces - some of these are either
   completely obsolete or of no interest at all to 3rd parties, being
   used only internally

2) on the other hand the current attitude is to never add the
   "published" tag to anything new if it can be at all avoided
   (see for example commit 78cca63070ae6cf82b45ec3bc75fafa2db31a7f2)
   - this likely includes useful interfaces that are sometimes the only
   available way to do something 3rd parties actually want, which means
   they *are* going to be used in practice, published or not

since the goal of the policy is  "we can make incompatible changes
whenever it doesn't affect any 3rd party extension or macro", the
"published" tag is much less useful as guidance than it may appear at
first glance.