On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 02:01:31PM -0700, John Plocher wrote: > [...] > > Things like Gnu tools, desktops, middleware and the like are another > matter - we live in a heterogeneous world where platform differences > cause severe developer and end-user problems. The users of these > programs/libraries are already well aware of the evolutionary > stability -vs- perceived value tradeoffs, and resent efforts on our > part to arbitrarily or artificially manipulate their options.
+1 > In my mind, ANY FOSS project that doesn't support the concurrent > installation of multiple versions on a system is fundamentally broken. Noting, of course, any DLL hell issues. > Of course, there should be an architectural framework for them to do > this, and that framework should support the concepts of "default > version" as well as "version used by the OS" because those versions > may or may not be the same at any given point in time. > > There were a few cases over in WSARC-land a few years ago about > architecturally coherent silos of middleware, but I don't think there > has been any substantive activity since then. > > Where is the ARC leadership in this area? Dunno, but it should be a matter of running a case to update the interface taxonomy. We basically need to revive "External". I'd add that it is useful to tell users (in manpages) where to look for interface stability of interfaces that aren't part of core OpenSolaris, and even to tell them what we think those interface stabilities are. That's because setting expectations is useful. Of course, we should also caveat that if the upstream breaks an interface, we may break it too or that we may deliver multiple versions of whatever the item is. Nico --
