John Plocher wrote:
I also wasn't saying that source based systems don't have the concept of
an ABI. Rather, I was saying that, in general[1], processes based on the
presumption of "build the entire system" tend to not detect changes that
are source level compatible but still result in binary incompatibilities.
This is actually one of the big reasons the X.Org open source community is
moving from a model of building the entire X Window System as one big source
tree to a modular model, where each library, program, and driver module is
individually built, to make it easier to catch API & ABI compatibility issues
early, and to more clearly define the interfaces between the various parts of
the source. (It's not the only one. Things like the Xorg 6.8.1 release,
where 50 MB of source was reissued to fix a security hole in a single library,
and the much faster development rate of hardware, and thus hardware drivers,
than of other parts of the system, like the libX11 API, are also contributing
factors to the modularization of X.)
--
-Alan Coopersmith- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
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