Sync with gnome releases

[Linas Vepstas]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 02:03:47PM -0400, Derek Atkins was heard to remark:
> linas@linas.org (Linas Vepstas) writes:
> 
> > Maybe I should then rephrase my concerns.  When the next drop of
> > evolution comes out, it seems we'll have yet another round of
> > incompatible-library-version problems.  I don't see any easy way out
> > of this.
> 
> I'll try to avoid saying "I told you so" at this point.  Oops, I guess
> I just did, didn't I?  ;-)
> 
> The only way to get this to work is to NOT use bleeding-edge
> interfaces.  Give yourself an out and remain one-release behind.  I'm
> sure that an app written to gnome-1.2 would compile against gnome-1.4
> and work just fine.  This gives you forward compatibility when the
> bleeding stuff gets released.  But at the same time, you're not
> limiting your audience to only those willing or able to "upgrade" to
> the "latest-and-greatest".

Well, in some attempt at defense of our actions ... we decided that we
really couldn't live without the latest guile, gtkhtml and gnome-print.
It would have been to painful, too brain-damaged to try to live with
older versions of these things.  Hopefully, that will settle down.

Now, of course, I dunno what happens if/when we decide to manage accounts
and vendor lists with e.g. the gnome addressbook. Hopefully, its 'stable'
but we may find that we are the very first to ever use it in mode 'xyz',
and it turns out there's a killer bug that will only be fixed in the next 
version... Its painful to contemplate halting development while we wait
for the 'fixed' addressbook to become widespread (only to restart 
development, and find killer-bug #2...)

This happens.  The JVM is 'mature', yet I've seen java code that is so weird
that it exhibits a bug that isn't fixed until the latest and greatest
release.

--linas


-- 
Linas Vepstas -- linas@gnumatic.com -- http://www.gnumatic.com/