DeviceKit-power release next Monday (original) (raw)

David Zeuthen david at fubar.dk
Wed Oct 7 09:24:43 PDT 2009

On Wed, 2009-10-07 at 07:02 +0700, Mikhail Gusarov wrote:

Twas brillig at 19:40:48 06.10.2009 UTC-04 when david at fubar.dk did gyre and gimble:

DZ> Applications (that are not disk utility, partitioning etc. apps) DZ> should just be using the GIO API since it's simpler and do what DZ> they need (discover/watch mounts). Or, of course, similar APIs if DZ> you use other toolkits than the G stack. As involved in E stack, I should comment this leats to major PitA: either you need to keep code to talk to different versions of DK-[dp] (== bloat) or to restrict your libraries to a limited set of versions of DK-[dp] (== useless).

Well, it's not so much that we break ABI all the time (it's only happened once or twice or so). And when it happens, the break is usual trivial or minor. And it's not like I like ABI transitions either.

The thing is - we just want to reserve the right to do change the ABI. Which is completely reasonable. And this is just not going to change, sorry - there is absolutely no reason to keep a stable ABI for this kind of thing. It would hamper progress.

At the end of the day it's mostly a distro problem - when a distro updates DeviceKit-disks with a new ABI they need to make sure all users of DeviceKit-disks are properly updated. This may include writing patches to users of DeviceKit-disks. So you might get the distros to do the work.

If you, as a user of DeviceKit-disks, wants to support multiple ABIs then that's kind of your decision. I would recommend against it though, it's much better to just keep your code updated to the latest version.

FWIW, I think our version numbers should probably be changed so it is easier for distros to coordinate this effort. E.g. we should probably have

..

where an ABI break means increasing the abi-version field. Then distros can do things like

Requires: DeviceKit-disks >= 1.2.3 Requires: DeviceKit-disks < 1.3.0

or something in packages using the ABI.

DZ> GLib and/or Gtk+ would also provide implementations on Win32/OS DZ> X/whatever that uses the appropriate OS specific stuff.

So D-Bus DK-[dp] protocol is considered internal? D-Bus becomes just a mechanism for privilege separation and interaction with PolicyKit, and not a, uhm, service bus.

No, it is public ABI that is subject to change. So if you do use the ABI, be prepared to having to update your software once in a while. I don't think this is an outrageous thing to ask for. If you don't like this it's very simple: just don't use the ABI.

 David

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