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List:       freedesktop-xorg
Subject:    Re: [SCM TRANSITION] Re: Proposal: move Randr protocol and library
From:       Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith () sun ! com>
Date:       2006-04-18 18:46:57
Message-ID: 44453421.3070501 () sun ! com
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Egbert Eich wrote:
> I think we are moving slightly of topic here - but: the ABI has been stable 
> (modulo glitches) for 6 years. This sucked. Numerous problems we are facing 
> today exist because of this paradigm. Decalring any ABI stable for such a long
> period of time seems to be *insane*.

Your insanity is Sun's business model, and X's reality.   The libX11 ABI has
been stable much longer than 6 years - we can still run 15 year old X binaries
on Solaris today since while the libc & libX11 ABI's have grown, they haven't
broken existing applications.   Maintaining ABI stability is only insane when
the ABI isn't designed to allow evolving it while maintaining compatibility -
the XFree86 module ABI is at least partway there with the versioning, but
clearly still has some holes that could have been better designed to allow
change without breakage.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith@sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering

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