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

[Philip Reames]

On 07/17/2015 12:36 PM, Juergen Ributzka 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.
+1
>
> 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.
+1

I'd suggest we also have an officially unofficial policy about not 
versioning just for style or cleanliness reasons.  i.e. We should try to 
minimize churn of the API unless it's actually needed, or supporting an 
old API becomes unjustifiably complicated.
>
> Thoughts? Comments?
>
> Cheers,
> Juergen