[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] The Big Bump checklist

[Stefano Sabatini]

On date Tuesday 2011-02-22 17:24:24 +0100, Diego Elio Petten? encoded:
> Il giorno mar, 22/02/2011 alle 17.08 +0100, Stefano Sabatini ha scritto:
> > 
> > 3) the old API is dropped -> API/ABI break 
> 
> Sorry Stefano, but I think we're really talking about different things
> here, you cannot assimilate "API/ABI break" in a single statement, the
> two are very different things.
> 
> So let me rephrase a moment what IMHO should be the situation:
> 
>  - whatever was deprecated when 0.6 was released gets dropped, stuff
> will break but it was given enough time to adapt (API and ABI break);
>  - the previously un-prefixed symbols are dropped/hidden from the
> libraries (ABI break);

>  - a set of compatibility inline wrappers for the old _API_ (including
> unprefixed API) gets added to the installed headers, perhaps
> conditional, so that software written against non-deprecated API 0.6
> won't break during build.

How much work would it take? Also we never marked the interfaces which
were already deprecated in the 0.6 release, discerning old from new
changes, given the number of changes in the last year, is surely a
boring and time-consumming work. Also note that the bumping policy has
always been more or less release-agnostic (indeed after the bump it
usually follows a short transitional period when new changes are
introduced disregarding backward compatibility concerns).
 
> At this point, the old interfaces are clearly marked as deprecated
> during 0.7 lifetime and can be dropped in 0.8, and we don't have the
> overhead caused by keeping all unprefixed symbols.

Anyway for what I want, and given that I have no much awareness
related to distro packaging issues, I tend to just favor a simple
release and bump strategy which looks simple and conservative enough,
but I won't object other options, given that they won't hinder too
much main trunk development, which was and is my main focus.

What I want to say is just keep in mind the needs of the many users
which only use official releases (mainly for psychological reasons),
which constitutes a significant part of the application developers and
which would get screwed by the abrupt drop of the old deprecated API
when switching from 0.6 to 0.7.
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