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The Focus Of Wayland's Weston Compositor

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  • #21
    Originally posted by RahulSundaram View Post
    There are a lot of misleading info out there. You don't have to trust everything you hear. Among libraries in Linux, GNOME libraries are well known for having a strong ABI policy and parallel installable libraries when they do make ABI changes in major releases. This includes GTK, Gstreamer etc.
    I don't think the new GNOME theming is kept compatible between releases yet. Someone was on here recently complaining about that. Most of the GNOME libraries certainly are.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by smitty3268 View Post
      I don't think the new GNOME theming is kept compatible between releases yet. Someone was on here recently complaining about that. Most of the GNOME libraries certainly are.
      Theming is just a desktop thing and for GNOME Shell, only supported via an extension. I was only referring to the ABI of the libraries. That's the thing most applications care about.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by dee. View Post
        That's not what I have heard.
        You heard wrong. They do have issues with shell extensions breaking compatibility between versions, but in terms of the libraries people use to build applications, they're about as close to perfection as it gets. I remember just *one* ABI break in the Gnome 2 series, and that was forced by a third party library (cairo, I think), not by the Gnome devs themselves. One of the biggest elements of the Gnome 3 release was that it finally gave them a chance to break with the backward-compatibility, dropping support for a bunch of old APIs they'd been carrying for years.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by RahulSundaram View Post
          Theming is just a desktop thing and for GNOME Shell, only supported via an extension. I was only referring to the ABI of the libraries. That's the thing most applications care about.
          I know that, but it's likely what the poster was referring to. And it is breaking compatibility, just not the parts you care about.

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          • #25
            Originally posted by smitty3268 View Post
            I know that, but it's likely what the poster was referring to. And it is breaking compatibility, just not the parts you care about.
            I don't really run many third party applications. so personally ABI compatibility isn't important factor for me but OP was talking about how GNOME breaks compatibility in the context of a discussion about ABI/API compatibility for Weston. If OP did mean theming, that seems pretty offtopic.

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            • #26
              Originally posted by RahulSundaram View Post
              There are a lot of misleading info out there. You don't have to trust everything you hear. Among libraries in Linux, GNOME libraries are well known for having a strong ABI policy and parallel installable libraries when they do make ABI changes in major releases. This includes GTK, Gstreamer etc.
              Yes and no. Yes, the libraries on their own are ABI compatible if you keep with the same version. But there is no synchronization across libraries. So an application that was compiled for Gnome 3.0, along with the versions of the libraries available at the time, it is almost certainly not going to work with, say, Gnome 3.5, along with the versions of libraries available at that time. Yes, you can go back and compile for yourself the old, unmaintained versions of the libraries, but if you count that as ABI compatibility then there is no such thing as an ABI break.

              So yes, the individual parts of Gnome have an ABI policy they follow, but the desktop environment as a whole does not, because each part of it can do new, major, ABI-incompatible versions whenever they want.

              Compare this to, say, KDE, where an application compiled for KDE SC 4.0 should work with KDE SC 4.11, because there is a single ABI compatibility policy for everything.

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              • #27
                Originally posted by TheBlackCat View Post
                Yes and no. Yes, the libraries on their own are ABI compatible if you keep with the same version. But there is no synchronization across libraries. So an application that was compiled for Gnome 3.0, along with the versions of the libraries available at the time, it is almost certainly not going to work with, say, Gnome 3.5, along with the versions of libraries available at that time. Yes, you can go back and compile for yourself the old, unmaintained versions of the libraries, but if you count that as ABI compatibility then there is no such thing as an ABI break.

                So yes, the individual parts of Gnome have an ABI policy they follow, but the desktop environment as a whole does not, because each part of it can do new, major, ABI-incompatible versions whenever they want.

                Compare this to, say, KDE, where an application compiled for KDE SC 4.0 should work with KDE SC 4.11, because there is a single ABI compatibility policy for everything.
                If a application built against the foundational libraries in 3.0 doesn't work with 3.5, it is a bug. That is true for either desktop environment.

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