Re: moving toward a 3.0 release

[John W. Eaton]

On 27-Sep-2006, Søren Hauberg wrote:

| I don't really know much about this stuff, but here's my opinion.
| I basicly think 3.0.x could contain anything that doesn't break both API
| and ABI. I think it's a bit annoying that I have to recompile
| octave-forge when I upgrade octave. So it would be great if we could
| make sure the ABI is the same across 3.0.x releases. Then we could move
| to 3.1.x (or 3.2.x?) when the ABI and API needs changing.

That's what OCTAVE_API_VERSION is supposed to be for, though it tends
to change almost as often as OCTAVE_VERSION (see src/version.h).

If you really want to ensure that the ABI doesn't change for
relatively long periods of time, you will have to design something
simpler than what we have now (which is basically every externally
visible symbol in all of Octave) and then any code that just uses the
"stable" API will work even if the internals of Octave change
significantly.  Something like the MEX interface could accomplishes
this goal, but it seems quite limited to me.  Flexibility and features
vs. longer term stability.  You choose.

Anyway, I would really prefer to be discussing whether there are
features or bug fixes that people think are essential to have before
we release 3.0 instead of how we label the releases.

jwe