FOSS and Interface Taxonomy levels

[James Carlson]

Danek Duvall writes:
> But I still think there's a place for interfaces which change rapidly and
> incompatibly.  I myself would generally choose not to introduce such
> things, but if others want to do so, and yet others want to use them
> despite the risk, I don't really want to stand in their way.  DLL hell?
> Sure.  But with mandates for Sun projects not to use such things, with
> strong encouragement from distro maintainers not to use such things, and
> with warnings for developers not to use them, I think we can be honest
> about this part of the world without having to gate it off completely, even
> if navigating through it in any fashion we'd consider rational is
> impossible.

If I had some confidence that we were correctly identifying the things
that should be stable and those that need not be, then that'd be an
easier argument to make.  As it stands, I don't.  Does this look like
the work of a "chaotic" community or something that people should be
encouraged not to use?

  http://www.sane-project.org/docs.html

I don't think it does.  It looks quite well-behaved to me, which is
what I'd expect from a pretty mature open source product.  (I used to
use this same stuff well over a decade ago on AIX.)

For what it's worth, in those rare cases where something really is
changing all the time, I think we'd be doing people a much greater
service by providing a PORTS-like mechanism to allow them to download
and compile their own fresh bits right from the source repository with
minimal fuss.  No stale bits compiled by Sun are likely going to help
for fast-moving projects, and what developer would trust them or want
them anyway?

In the cases where things are stable and a good foundation for
building products, great, integrate away, and don't use "Volatile"
when you mean "not employed by SMI."  Otherwise, I don't see what
value we're contributing.

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
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