[Yum-devel] api compatibility

[Jeremy Katz]

On Thu, 2005-12-08 at 19:20 -0500, seth vidal wrote:
>  This came up on fedora-devel-list and I wanted to bring it up here:
> 
> What do folks think about maintaining api in the devel branch (HEAD)?
> 
> I've put no effort into making sure we maintain api compat with older
> versions of yum and specifically some of the infrastructure is changing
> such that it won't really be possible (comps file, as an example)

I think we're far better off in terms of API compat than may be thought.
While there are some areas which are heavily not (the comps file stuff
being the big example), there hasn't been much I've hit which isn't in
anything used by pup or anaconda.  A lot of the changes going in will
_help_ users by actually providing some API instead of requiring the use
of internal bits of yum.  But where herculean efforts aren't required, I
don't think that maintaining compat hurts us and actually helps in
encouraging people to use the API instead of doing ugly things like
screen scraping.

For post 2.6.0, my view on API changing will start to be less fuzzy but
I think that going through and actually defining "the API to use" will
help make that more reasonable.  

Jeremy