[sane-devel] SANE frozen in amber ?

[m. allan noah]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Richard
Ryniker<ryniker at ryniker.ods.org> wrote:
>> a frontend that asks for new, unsupported features, will simply
>> get an appropriate error code.
>
> Allen Noah, earlier in this thread (Thu Jun 11 19:08:28 UTC 2009) alluded
> to the problem with this approach when he wrote:
>
>>bah- then no front-end will use it, since it is not guaranteed to be
>>there.

<snip>

> I believe SANE, like many other applications, will find it better to change
> its API in infrequent, discrete steps than to follow a "continuous change
> is permitted" strategy.

Well, you can't get much more infrequent API changes than SANE :)

Seriously, we have to bump the major number on the soversion to do any
changes. The only real question is what do we do with all the
unmaintained backends?

1: drag them along via modification
2: leave them behind and make the frontends link against sane1 and sane2
3: leave them behind and use a sane-compat meta-backend to make them
appear to have the sane2 api
4: make our API modifications small enough that old backends will be
forward compatible

Note that all 4 of these options are easier for the programmer if the
API changes are kept small. Are there any other choices?

allan
-- 
"The truth is an offense, but not a sin"