On 3/19/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">James Schend</b> <<a href="mailto:blakeyrat@gmail.com">blakeyrat@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
One of the reasons to use a library, from my perspective, is that the<br>interfaces can remain constant while the internals can be patched to<br>ensure there are no bugs/security problems. For instance, when libpng<br>had that buffer overflow last year, that single library was updated to
<br>correct the problem without affecting the functioning of any of the<br>hundreds of programs that used it. It would be nice if the same could<br>be done with Twisted but, as there is not currently a stable interface<br>
to it, that is impossible.</blockquote><div><br>You said a bunch of things about how great it is to share code, and then made a weird assertion at the end about how some code in Twisted can't provide those great things. I'm not seeing the logical connection. Why can't we fix bugs, even security holes, just because the API is marked "unstable"? The only thing an "unstable" marker means that we are allowing ourselves the freedom of *also* changing the interface of the library. Anyway, as Itamar said, we always try to keep interfaces backwards compatible, even if they're marked as "unstable". The "unstable" marker does not say "we will ignore backwards compatibility", it is "if there are really good reasons, we might might break the interface". The only reason the *old* telnet implementation wasn't marked unstable was that nobody had even gotten around to adding a "stability" marker to it.
<br><br>Anyway, as it comes down to it, you're telling us to do things that we can't do without funding or more developer time. Even if there are thousands of developers who feel the same way, that doesn't change anything. Regardless, I still strongy suggest that you're reading way too much into the "API stability: unstable" marker, and I encourage you to use and help improve the Telnet code in Conch.
<br><br></div></div>-- <br>Christopher Armstrong<br>International Man of Twistery<br><a href="http://radix.twistedmatrix.com/">http://radix.twistedmatrix.com/</a><br><a href="http://twistedmatrix.com/">http://twistedmatrix.com/
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