[wx-dev] [all] 2.7.0 and releases organization in general

[Alex Bligh]

Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> On Sun, 06 Aug 2006 13:35:56 +0100 Alex Bligh <alex at alex.org.uk> wrote:
> 
> AB> Would you seriously suggest we used a frozen 2.7 in Xara, for instance,
> AB> rather than sticking with 2.6?
> 
>  No, not for Xara because you use standard 2.6 shared libs. And while I'm
> very glad you do and I hope that this is going to be more and more common
> with time, right now the vast majority of wx applications link with wx
> statically. And for them it may make sense to use 2.7.

Yes. To static/dynamic is an ABI-driven choice. There's also an API
thing. Even if we static linked to wx, an unstable API would cause us
problems if lots of people were compiling our app in the field (and we
didn't ship wx). So linking statically to 2.7 is only a complete
solution if you are the only one that compiles (or, of course, you
ship a 2.7 snapshot with your app).

Anyway, no point arguing too much over this as I think we both agree
what the dangers are, even if we have a slightly different view of
their relative weight against the advantages.

> AB> "You should thus expect that if your program compiles under one version
> AB> of wx 2.7, it may well not compile under a subsequent version of 2.7.
> AB> If you want to guarantee your program will always compile and run, then
> AB> you may either need to ship it with a particular snapshot of 2.7,
> AB> OR perhaps 2.7 is not for you, and you should use 2.6 instead.
> AB> 2.7 has also received less testing than 2.6, and many of its
> AB> features are newer; if this worries you, then consider using 2.6
> AB> instead. We do not encourage 2.7 to be put into distributions. This is
> AB> because it is still under active development, and the API between
> AB> versions may change. On the other hand, 2.7 contains many features
> AB> and indeed bug-fixes that are not present in 2.6."
> 
>  This is good but IMO doesn't belong to the release announcement (too
> long, too unrelated to the announcement itself). Maybe we should put this
> explanation somewhere on the website (if we don't have anything like this
> already) and just put "see <URL> for the description of development
> release"?

That would be fine. I just have visions of people coming back later and
saying "but you didn't warn me". Provided we give people every chance
to make an *informed* decision, I am happy. The existing sentence
alone I thought did not quite do that. A URL would fix it.

Alex