On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 07:21:34PM -0700, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > Adam Heath <doogie@debian.org> writes: > > > On 19 May 2002, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > > > > > The other is the RPC interfaces that the servers use to talk to each > > > other. These are basically static, and don't change except by > > > extension. > > > > You can't honestly expect this to always be the case. No one can implement > > everything perfectly the first time around. > > Um, actually we can! Because we have experience with how it works. > > We can extend the interface at liberty without breaking compatibility > at all. That's just a property of the way the RPC interfaces work. > Also, the names of interface functions are not part of the RPC > interface itself, but only of the library ABI interface. > > As a result, a new RPC can be added without breaking the old RPCs at > all. Indeed, it can even take over the name of the old RPC. The > result is then that the library ABI changes--and it is versioned--but > the RPC itself doesn't need a versioning. And if I understand all this correctly, if a subsystem was designed for some specific functionality and you can't easily extent that functionality with adding RPCs, you can just make a new subsystem. A server could then implement both subsystems for backwards compatiblity and drop the old one when it isn't needed anymore. Incompatibility isn't forced by nature. Jeroen Dekkers -- Jabber ID: jdekkers@jabber.org IRC ID: jeroen@openprojects GNU supporter - http://www.gnu.org
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