On Sat, Mar 02, 2013, Martin Pitt wrote: > Loïc Minier [2013-03-01 12:10 +0100]: > > I don't think we can make any commitment against all of Ubuntu or all of > > main, but we could pick a subset by product and commit to some level of > > API and ABI support for this subset. > > I still disagree. A few years ago we heavily promoted quickly+pygtk2 > as THE app dev platform, only to deprecate it about a year later when > gobject-introspection and GTK3 came along. After that has caught on > for a while, we are now telling people "forget about GTK, use Qt/QML > as app dev API". The former was already on the horizon at that time, > and we were fully responsible for the latter by ourselves. > > Who knows what the app dev API du jour will be after 14.04? It's not > totally inconceivable that we'll go back to e. g. GI and JavaScript, > as upstream GNOME currently intends to do, or even to different APIs > that are being used by other OSes (Android, FirefoxOS, and the like). > > We shouldn't make promises which we cannot guarantee to hold, so let's > rather be clear and say "this is the API for *this* LTS".
I don't think this is contradictory; it would be fine to deprecate API/ABI in one LTS to remove it in the next for instance. Still, we do need to pick a subset and commit to supporting it at least until the next LTS (inclusive). Still, while I can't exclude that there will be reasons to consider yet another API, we should try hard to pick a stable API and stick to it. In fact, it might be multiple APIs; such as one Qt/QML high-level API, a C/C++/OpenGL + some libs lower level API, an API for HTML5/webapps to integrate in the launcher etc. -- Loïc Minier -- ubuntu-devel mailing list ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel