Hi Björn, Bjoern Michaelsen wrote:
1/ We unpublish all API
Ok so far -
2/ We give UNO user an opportunity to ask for republishing specific parts of the API, when they provide a reasonable use case and promise to be the "client steward" for these.
This is where the plan breaks already. To relay some stories from real life - there's _so_ much integration with especially OpenOffice out there, coming from legacy systems, tons of macro-ized applications, sometimes bespoke development with the company simply selling, not developing anymore - that by the time those deployments 'see' our unpublished API (and subsequent changes thereof), it's gonna be much, much, much too late to do anything about it. Those people will then simply walk away. The idea that we could somehow entice a sizeable chunk of our API consumers to be part of our community is a pipe dream. Like it or not, with taking over market share from OpenOffice we inherited that API promise, and I'd really prefer to continue serving that market segment. I mean, Linux has not been exactly timid in changing implementation quite rapidly, still they managed to keep the userland API reasonably stable. Why can't we? Except for the repulsiveness of XFoo2, XFoo3, and some extra day of hacking here or there - did this really hold us back so far?
There might be some hope that UNO API users like WollMux, Mendeley, Zotero might be interested in this -- and by talking to them instead of with $ANONYMOUS_GUY_ON_THE_INTERTUBES we might get a sensible feedback channel and bring out ecosystem closer together -- as they have incentives to join this discussion.
Orthogonally to the above, that's a really worthwhile idea. I was once already kicking the idea of an API forum / mailing list / whatever around; perhaps -- if properly seeded & tended -- the dev askbot instance could be that? Cheers, -- Thorsten
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