FreeLists / argyllcms / [argyllcms] Re: ArgyllCMS build system

[Graeme Gill <graeme@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hal V. Engel wrote:

> Gerhard Fuernkranz wrote:
> > IMO one of the major problems is that the various Argyll libraries seem
> > to be considered "internal interfaces" only. These interfaces are not
> > stable and may change with each new version of Argyll, and they are
> > obviously neither guaranteed to be ABI nor API compatible with the
> > previous versions. So there will always be a strict 1:1 version
> > dependency between Argyll and a particular application (like lprof)
> > which uses Argyll libraries, and different applications may require
> > different versions of Argyll as prerequisite. 
>
> This is the main issue.   I am not sure if this will always be true but I 
> don't expect it to change any time soon.
Yes, this is likely to be true for a long time. For my own sanity
I try and minimize such internal API changes, but it would
be crippling to attempt anything more strict currently, and a
complete re-factoring of the whole code base is really needed to
have any hope of becoming stable.

Some interfaces are more stable than others, and I'm
trying to minimize disruption to other people using
the more popular ones (icclib, inst, imdi), but strict
backwards compatibility is not something I'm currently
prepared to do, and a minor reason for not attempting
to group things into shared libraries at the moment.

Graeme Gill.