ABI breakage in 2.10.4 --> 2.11.6?

Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos nmav at gnutls.org
Mon Feb 21 23:43:40 CET 2011


On 02/21/2011 10:04 PM, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <nmav at gnutls.org> writes:
> 
>> On 02/19/2011 04:30 PM, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>>
>>>>>> That's a nice question. This API is mostly interesting to people
>>>>>> who are porting gnutls to another crypto library. We might
>>>>> An API is an API, is an API.
>>>> Indeed but it doesn't have to be stable. That part was intended to
>>>> change often by design.
>>> I don't think that is wise in the long run -- if we want people to use
>>> the APIs they must be stable.  If they aren't intended to be stable, it
>>> is better to mark them as private functions by prefixing them with
>>> _gnutls instead or similar.
>>
>> Indeed, but the API is already there. If we now add an underscore, then
>> we would break ABI... We could modify them in version 3 that breaks
>> the ABI anyway.
> 
> Yes.  Fortunately I don't think many projects have started using it
> since it is such a recent feature and it something that is rarely used.
> So we could mark it as deprecated in 2.12.0 and remove it for 3.0.

Yes. Internal APIs shouldn't have been exposed in the first place.

regards,
Nikos




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