I would like to know whether application developers really want Jolla to fulfill this obligation or prefer more APIs allowed in Harbour (accepting that it may break more often):
This poll is for all people who have written/are writing Sailfish applications:
- stable APIs are very important, number of allowed APIs/libs in Harbour unimportant
- something in between
- stable APIs more important than number of allowed APIs/libs in Harbour
- no preference
- potentially unstable APIs ok (may break roughly once in 6 months), want more allowed APIs/libs in Harbour
- potentially unstable APIs ok (may break roughly once in 3 months), want more allowed APIs/libs in Harbour
- bleeding-edge APIs
edit: can’t edit the poll anymore, but “something in between” is between “stable APIs are very important, number of allowed APIs/libs in Harbour unimportant” and “stable APIs more important than number of allowed APIs/libs in Harbour”
I think that, given the current release cycle, Jolla could allow more unstable APIs in Harbour, because releases are far away from each other. Even if each second Sailfish update breaks something, it’s not that often.
The only problem I see is communication:
As an application developer, I would like to know beforehand (even before early access, since it doesn’t give that much time) what will probably break. For this, it would be enough for Jolla publishing a “volatile” change log which gets updated as soon as the internal work on some component is done. That is, it’s clear that it will probably make it into the next release - if you are unsure, you can still add a warning like “don’t take anything written here for granted”…
And finally: Considering that most applications are open source and can be recompiled easily, Jolla should save resources and shouldn’t try so hard to maintain ABI (binary) compatibility.