Re: Mozilla xpcom VS. NS6.0 xpcom

[Brendan Eich]

> *yes*: don't sweat it. forcing implementers to freeze interfaces once the
> magic ship-date has arrived, and then to support both old interfaces and any
> new ones added later ... is one of the worst lies perpetrated by
> Booch/Grady/Gamma/etc...

You make a good point.  Others quail about the OLE1/2/3 compatibility 
nightmares.  We shouldn't worship compatibility over all other goods, 
and if some interface isn't freeze-worthy, it'll be left out of the set 
of blessed Mozilla APIs.

However, we aim to have such a set, because developers can't afford to 
"port" to every new release of "Mozilla system libraries" -- some of 
which may come from downstream distros (RedHat, let's say) in their own 
good time.  For sure, libraries must have version numbers in their names 
on systems where that's the convention, so multiple versions can 
coexist.  But we'd like a common set of APIs in recent, if not all, 
versions to be consistent and frozen.

/be