[bt-devel] Compatibility break: Sword 1.6RC1->RC2 API change

[Jonathan Morgan]

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 12:33 PM, Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:
>
>> Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:
>
>>> Troy changed the Sword InstMgr API between RC1 and RC2.
>
> Which I just discovered, trying to package BibleTime 2.0 beta1 with the
> RC2 libraries installed!
>
> Intuitively, this feels like a poor moment to make an API change.  RC
> means Release Candidate.  If the SWORD API was considered good enough to
> release at the time of releasing RC1, then by definition it was still
> good enough for RC2 (or else the fix was for a major security problem or
> something like that, which absolutely *required* an API change to fix --
> not the case here, AFAICS).

What it means is nothing more or less than that you use RC to mean a
different thing from how it is being used.  RC1 was the first release
to the wider development community after some reasonably major
internal changes had been made.  I'm sure Troy wanted and believed it
to have the stability of a release candidate, but since major
frontends had not been tested with it at all and it changed the API
for things like InstallMgr, it is hardly surprising that things might
need to change.  Considering what it actually was rather than what it
was called, first alpha or first beta is a much more reasonable
description.

Jon