Avoiding fragmentation with a rolling release

[Martin Pitt]

Loïc Minier [2013-03-01 12:10 +0100]:
> I don't think we can make any commitment against all of Ubuntu or all of
> main, but we could pick a subset by product and commit to some level of
> API and ABI support for this subset.

I still disagree. A few years ago we heavily promoted quickly+pygtk2
as THE app dev platform, only to deprecate it about a year later when
gobject-introspection and GTK3 came along. After that has caught on
for a while, we are now telling people "forget about GTK, use Qt/QML
as app dev API". The former was already on the horizon at that time,
and we were fully responsible for the latter by ourselves.

Who knows what the app dev API du jour will be after 14.04? It's not
totally inconceivable that we'll go back to e. g. GI and JavaScript,
as upstream GNOME currently intends to do, or even to different APIs
that are being used by other OSes (Android, FirefoxOS, and the like).

We shouldn't make promises which we cannot guarantee to hold, so let's
rather be clear and say "this is the API for *this* LTS".

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)