[LLVMdev] [RFC] Developer Policy for LLVM C API

[Eric Christopher]

Hi Juergen, Sean,

I definitely agree with needing to write down the policy and definitely any
policy should include a deprecation time :)

Did you want to write up something and let us poke at it?

A couple of thoughts outside of a deprecation policy:

a) guarantee that the api itself won't go away, but could possibly be
turned into a noop? (i.e. source compatibility)
b) versioning? (Should we add support for versioning in anyhow? Maybe a C
API version 2 to start this off with?)
c) One of the big things appears to be the push and pull for "A C API for
all C++ entry points" along with "We don't want to get locked into
immobility because we have a C API for all C++ entry points". Perhaps part
of this might be defining an actual stable set of things along with an
unstable set of things?

What was the rest of your discussion on this? Any particular points you
think the community would be interested in?

Just some random thoughts.

-eric

On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 12:54 PM Sean Silva <chisophugis at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think it makes sense to officially document this. It has apparently
> never graduated from being "tribal knowledge".
>
> As far as the concrete details, I haven't thought too much, but the
> deprecation process you suggested makes sense to me.
>
> -- Sean Silva
>
> On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 12:36 PM, Juergen Ributzka <juergen at apple.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi @ll,
>>
>> a few of us had recently a discussion about how to manage the C API and
>> possible policies regarding addition, maintenance, deprecation, and removal
>> of API.
>>
>> Even thought there is a strong agreement in the community that we
>> shouldn't break released C API and should be backwards compatible, there
>> doesn’t seem to be a developer policy that backs that up. This is something
>> we should fix.
>>
>> I was wondering what the interested parties think of the current approach
>> and what could/should we improve to make the use and maintenance of the C
>> API easier for users and the developers alike.
>>
>> I was hoping we could also introduce a process that allows the removal of
>> an API after it has been deprecated for a whole release and the release
>> notes stated that it will be removed.
>>
>> Thoughts? Comments?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Juergen
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>>
>
>
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