[Cabal] Contract change

[Etan Reisner]

On Wed, 8 Nov 2006, Ethan Blanton wrote:
>>  - how about we add a task to provide a script to try to re-namespace
>> existing plugins as best we can? (for 3rd party plugins that have
>> already gone to great pains to keep up with the 2.0.0beta API changes)
>
> If we rename tons of stuff, this would be a good idea; probably we can
> get most of the way there with some simple sed on gaim_gtk_ and then
> gaim_.  That said, I don't think we should really change API naming,
> and this is one of the big reasons.
>
> Ethan

I've been pretty quiet on all things cabal mostly because I think 
everyone else has devoted more time to thinking about it and is doing a 
good enough job so far. But on this particular topic I have a thought, 
I think we probably should renamespace the public functions to match the 
name change and that this will put a burden on plugin authors. To 
mitigate this burden perhaps we should consider creating and installing 
a {gaim,pidgin,purple}-compat.h header which #defines the old names to 
the new names, thus allowing things to continue working without needing 
to change immediately, we could mark it as temporary and keep it around 
for the duration of the 2.x.x versions. (The lua language recently had 
to change some of their public api and did exactly this, which is where 
I got the idea from, they actually go a bit farther but I think that 
part of things is backwards.)

 	-Etan