[Flac-dev] API breakage in libflac

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller]

Hi,
The GStreamer flac plugin broke due to libflac 1.1.0 and libflac 1.1.1
not being ABI/API compatible. Skimming through the archives I see that
this breakage was intentional. I think it is quite common understanding
that when you have a stable release of something you don't break your
API, you only add to it. If you want to break the API that should be
done by going to a new major number, like libflac 2.0 and ideally make
the two versions parallel installable. 

There are a lot of packages depending on libflac today and I ended up
having to deinstall a lot of stuff in order to install the new version
of libflac as we have now updated our plugin to the new API.

But for the future please be serious about API stability as you are
really screwing developers and packagers depending on you by changes
like this.

It could of course be that libflac 1.1.x is not considered a stable
release series and that the world should have stuck with libflac 1.0.x
for now, but nothing on your website gives me this impression and I
guess since most distros ship 1.1.x now it means that they too assume it
is a stable release series.

Apologize if people feel I am flaming, but my frustration level went
rather high today as I was doing some QA work in preparation for a new
release.

Christian