[Branko Cibej] > Like I said in my response to this in the other thread -- API or even > ABI compatibility is not the issue. Working copy formats, wire > protocol quirks, etc. etc. are more "interesting". And I really don't > think it's up to us to tell packagers how to do their stuff.
Well, the reason I bring it up is, if we expect everyone to bundle a copy of libsvn with every app, then our hard work to guarantee ABI stability is basically pointless. The whole reason to have a stable ABI is so people can upgrade libsvn without rebuilding or redownloading other apps. At some point we must have thought that was important. And if we did manage to achieve an ecosystem in which people are not bundling libsvn, the problem of multiple libsvn versions talking to a single wc would be greatly reduced. (Maybe not completely eliminated, as there's still the case of a wc on a network filesystem accessed from multiple clients machines.) That is why I wondered if there's any way we can get there, by encouraging people to take advantage of our ABI stability feature, which as I said we really do work hard to maintain. But it sounds like a lot of people really do prefer the vertical approach (every app bundles every library), in the Windows world, and there may not be much we can do about it. Peter