Hello Mike! :-)

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 8:14 PM, Mike Frysinger <[email protected]> wrote:
> i'm more than familiar with shared library policies, but for something that
> has grown organically like urjtag, i dont think it's reasonable to try and get
> it "perfect" the first time.  if we screw up, we bump the SONAME and then we
> dont have to keep baggage around.  i honestly dont think urjtag is an
> important enough piece of software atm that bumping the SONAME is going to
> cause enormous grief.

Well, to be honest this kind of attitude "we can bump it" made me
leave Linux in favour of FreeBSD, where almost everything in API and
config looks the same for years and some new functionalities are
added/expanded but not replacing the old ones each time they show up
;-) UrJTAG is pretty mature as for now I think and we can try to
figure out some generic API that won't have to change with the
underlying stuff. I do agree that UrJTAG may not the broadway star
across the world software (for me that is okay), so some screwups can
happen (as always), but they should not be our assumption - the
assumption should be interoperability, generic interface,
expandability and backward compatibility... I am not talking about
total reorganization of the current API, but also not to changing it
every bump, possibly to avoid the bumps at all by expanding library
with some helper functions - maybe by working on these basic
functions...

I dream about UrJTAG library to be a set of functions loadable by a
nice Python script with GUI that can always work the same way, even
with the next 10th or 50th release of urjtag library. Some new
releases could implement new devices, algothms and helpers to be used
with new software tools, but the generic function set should always
work the same way, so there is no need for the older upper layer
sofware to be rewritten. Maybe this approach is obsolete, but I always
get a bit angry with new release of Gimp or Blender (etc) that forces
me to search through so called "new better gui design" for options
that are not in its old place with no well known shortcuts anymore (I
even remember few years ago Linux kernel renamed function names to
access PCI bus so I had to rewrite a driver to work again :\). If I
were using urjtag library I would rather concentrate on a tool
development and maintenence than rewriting that tool for urjtag
library each time it comes out...

I think this is a good time to start such discussion and try to
implement it in one of the next releases - there are many people
already that I know awaiting for the UrJTAG as a library :-)

Best regards,
Tomek


-- 
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info

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