[maemo-developers] Backwards compatibility broken PR1.1 SDK

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

Stoppa Igor (Nokia-D/Helsinki) wrote:
>> This really isn't hard!  For the vast majority of applications there is no 
>> reason at all why they cannot be built against the first software release and 
>> install on all later releases, taking advantage of the bug fixes made since.  
>> I have been doing that for GPE since the first Maemo release.  That is what 
>> the autobuilder should be doing by default -- no need to make life hard for 
>> users **by default**!
> 
> Building is not so much my concern, but rather testing: what is going to 
> be the accepted environment for approving and releasing a new version of 
> your sw? Hopefully not the first sales release.

Although SW would be built against the shared libraries from the initial
release, they should of course be tested against the latest release.

If the software doesn't work in the latest release because minor Maemo
update broke binary _backwards_ compatibility in some library, only then
it needs a separate build (also) for latest release SW libraries.


One of the problems is that we don't have any automated thing that would
report about ABI incompatibilities between shared library version.  This
would also tell developers who've integrated an application to first
release, to build and check it against a latest one because it had
a binary incompatible change for one of their direct dependencies.


	- Eero