Re: [Libexif-devel] libexif API changes

[Lutz <lu...@us...>]

On Mon, 2004-07-12 at 18:24, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> I am the package maintainer of libexif for Red Hat and the Fedora 
> Project.  I am trying to keep up with the latest release of libexif, but 
> I just noticed the the API changed in 0.5.13, which will require some 
> work for other applications.  We are currently using 0.5.12.  Does the 
> libexif team anticipate many more API changes in future releases?

We thought this change is worth the hassle. If someone has a good idea,
we'll put it into libexif. Otherwise, things won't improve.

> Other 
> applications should be reluctant to require libexif if that is the case.

In the MS-Windows world, people copy & paste the code into their
projects. That's always an option to avoid every problem. The small size
allows for that. In gphoto2 I have used AC_CHECK_LIB and
AC_CHECK_HEADER. In addition, we provide pkg-config --modversion. 

If you give me the names of projects that do not use those methods for
avoiding troubles compiling with libexif, I will look into fixing them.

> Additionally, I will note that it would probably be nice to expose 
> LIBEXIF_CURRENT or similar in a .h file which things can #include to 
> support building against multiple versions of libexif.

This is easily done in the individual project using above outlined
methods (isn't this what configure.in files are for?).

If you still think we should expose a LIBEXIF_CURRENT definition, can
you point me to a project where this method is used successfully so that
I can code along that?

Regards

Lutz