Re: [ft-devel] web page for the forthcoming 2.2.0 release

[Ilya Konstantinov]

Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> [discussion continued on freetype-devel only]
>   
Sorry for that. I was to quick to press Send.
>   
> > A new version which makes such a radical change should bump up the 
> > shared object version (.so.N).
> >     
>
> Where's the `radical change'?
>   
Symbols which were previously exported are no longer exported. This is 
exactly the kind of compatibility changes .so version numbers are 
intended for.
It's just like when you change a COM interface, no matter if the 
function you've changed was marked INTERNAL in screaming caps, you'd 
still change the interface UUID.
>   
> > That way we'll allow a transition period for applications to update.
> >     
>
> This has been discussed recently on the FreeType list, and the
> consensus seems to be that it is better to fix the applications than
> to increase the DLL version to avoid even more problems.
>   
Sorry, I didn't notice this discussion :/ Although I'm not a FreeType 
developer, I'd express my opinion on this since I feel strongly about 
having the best level of binary compatibility on the free desktop and to 
avoid the problems described in the famous Linux Problems document[1].

What kind of problems would the version bump cause?
Are we not bumping versions simply to force all applications to fix 
their code rather than sticking to their old-and-working FreeType version?

[1] http://plan99.net/autopackage/Linux_Problems