[maemo-developers] Maemo 5 PR1.2 and Extras

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi,

Niels Breet wrote:
>> Niels Breet wrote:
>>> Maemo 5 PR1.2 seems to be a release with some large changes which are
>>> not backwards compatible with previous releases. Most visible change
>>> will be the inclusion of Qt4.6, but there will be some other smaller
>>> changes.
>> When you say "not backwards compatible", does that mean that
>> applications built with 1.0 or 1.1 will not work on 1.2?
> 
> That would be forward compatible in my book ;)

Tomayto-tomahto.

backwards compatible usually means that new interfaces support old
applications. Windows 95 was backwards compatible with Windows 3.1, so
old .exes still ran unchanged. You didn't even have to recompile.

That's what I'm asking - will PR 1.0 packages & executables continue to
work on PR1.2?

>> Or is it ABI
>> compatible, but adds new interfaces, so that applications built with 1.2
>> won't necessarily work on 1.1 or 1.0 (which is a different & less serious
>> issue in that if you don't use the new interfaces your application should
>> still work unchanged on the older releases)?
> 
> Applications built on PR1.2 won't work on older versions. There are
> exceptions, some applications might work, but those make this very
> complicated.

All applications? That seems unusual - especially since the GNOME
project (and thus a bunch of the libraries in the API) work very hard to
ensure API & ABI compatibility. If I compile, unchanged, an application
with the PR1.2 API which previously worked on PR1.0, I would expect the
new package to continue to work correctly. I would expect it to stop
working only after I started using interfaces not available in the old
platform.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
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