RE: [Devel] Project steering

[Turner David]

Humm, humm,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden
> Behalf Of Mihai Barbos
> Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2004 3:23 PM
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: [Devel] Project steering
> 
> 
> You change the API (the header files) on a revision number change ?!? 
> Who taught you that ?
> 
> Let me put it this way:  IMHO freetype is a project that is necessary 
> and important for the OpenSource community. Maintaining and 
> steering it 
> in the wrong way is not a good thing for the community. Also changing 
> versions and releasing packages based on the "it's my birthday, I'll 
> release it" policy is a bad idea. Already a huge part of the 
> OpenSource 
> projects are incompatible with themselves or reinventing the wheel 
> (usually achieving a square wheel). Please do not put any 
> effort in the 
> way of making linux (and others) "the most incompatible OS 
> with itself" 
> (I don't remember who said that, but unfortunately he seems 
> to be right).
> So, please, if you really insist to break compatibility, change, at 
> least, the minor version. Or make the old inclusion schema 
> still valid 
> and generate just a warning, not an error when old include 
> sequence is used.
> 

Well, the reason we "changed" the API was precisely because several
Linux distributions already used mutually exclusive ways to install
the library header files, causing *great* havoc for ordinary users and
library implementors who didn't know how to find the relevant files
during a "configure".

That's why we introduced the "change", which was *fully* backwards
compatible with the old one. We also announced that the #include
scheme needed to change in client libraries and applications a
**very** long time ago. We also repeatedly informed people asking
on the mailing list about the "problem".

Most developers have changed their source to suit the new convention.
It's only recently that we discontinued support for the old scheme
to reveal the few remaining broken libs.

It's not like we did it for the fun of it, using macros in #include
statements is actually pretty ugly, but was a necessary step to a
uniform installation of the library.

Things are much better now for everyone, than in the 2.0.4 days, though
you might not realize it :-)

Regards,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)


> 
> Best regards and thanks for a really nice piece of software
> Mihai
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 

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