[vlc-devel] [PATCH] libvlc: add language and frame rate to libvlc_media_track_info_t

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

On Tue, 9 Oct 2012 17:17:22 +0200, Felix Paul Kühne
<fkuehne.videolan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Oct 9, 2012, at 4:49 PM, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
> 
>> On Tue,  9 Oct 2012 16:34:03 +0200, Rafaël Carré <funman at videolan.org>
>> wrote:
>>> From: Sébastien Toque <xilasz at gmail.com>
>> 
>> Changing the size of libvlc_media_track_info_t is not allowed, since it
>> breaks binary compatibility.
> 
> Isn't this acceptable for major releases such as 2.1?

Sure. There are several conditions though:
- You bring an important new feature or a major design fox. 
- You update the binary version numbers as appropriate (I do not even know
how to do that except on Linux).
- You remove all the legacy LibVLC stuff that was only left for backward
compatibility.
- You update the documentation.
- You take adequate measures to avoid the same problem occurring again
with the same family of functions (i.e. next time some bit of track info is
added).

I think the patch fails every one of the above.

> I mean, x264's ABI breaks all the time, too…

On Linux, you can bump the SONAME version. On Windows, we avoid the
problem by linking statically.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
Sent from my collocated server