xfce4-panel broken [WAS: Netk deprecation notice [WAS Re: [proposal] Modify the panel-plugin interface, add 'powersave-mode'.]]

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Jani Monoses wrote:
>> Didn't you remove XfceClock from libgui?  That's an API and ABI change,
>> and the libtool version number needs to be bumped (regardless of who
>> you think was or wasn't using that part of the lib, it still needs to
>> happen).
> 
> Shouldn't API/ABI changes be flagged with libtool version bumping only at the start of the
> dev cycle once, to make them  visibly incompatible with the stable branch? The libs
> are only for developer or savvy users' consumption they should be able to rebuild
> things without being notified of these changes explicitly and run everything from svn, no?
> Otherwise changes taking place at different points in time during the dev cycle
> will needlessly bump the final .so number too much at release time.
> Unreleased libraries' changes should not affect the final .so number when released IMHO.

Yes and no.  We shouldn't just bump the version number because we're 
starting a new dev cycle.  It should only be bumped for incompatible 
changes.  The libtool manual suggests what you describe: only bumping it 
for final releases so the interface version doesn't grow too quickly. 
But really, what does it matter?  It's just a number.  And given that 
our dev cycles are pretty long, it cuts down on the number of spurious 
bugs filed just because people have incompatible versions installed.

I'm not really sold either way on this...

	-brian