pidgin.next.minor: f00a8560: Use up the last padding for PurplePlugin...

[Sadrul Habib Chowdhury]

* Daniel Atallah had this to say on [05 May 2008, 13:36:49 -0400]:
> On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 3:00 AM, <sadrul at pidgin.im> wrote:
> 
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------
> > Revision: f00a8560ccde5ca23be0911c55f8914f49e80c41
> > Ancestor: d2b411c3bdf299282e63ddaf7dd798f86b2993c8
> > Author: sadrul at pidgin.im
> > Date: 2008-05-05T06:19:46
> > Branch: im.pidgin.pidgin.next.minor
> > URL:
> > http://d.pidgin.im/viewmtn/revision/info/f00a8560ccde5ca23be0911c55f8914f49e80c41
> >
> > Use up the last padding for PurplePluginProtocolInfo in a way that allows
> > adding newer functions without causing any major version bump. This is
> > based on the changes from the .vv branch. I changed the
> > PURPLE_PROTOCOL_PLUGIN_HAS_FUNC macro a little so it can be used for the
> > old as well as the new functions. Someone should confirm this looks OK.
> 
> 
> This is something that I wish we had done for 2.0.0 as the first struct
> element.
> 

Indeed. Having this in from the beginning would've been helpful.

> I think there is value in doing this, but arguably it'd be better to put it
> in 3.0.0 and then direct our efforts to getting that out the door instead of
> squeezing it into  next.minor.
> 

The problem with not doing this now, as I see, is that new prpl features
cannot be added in 2.x. The work towards 3.x hasn't started yet, as far
as I am aware. There's no major feature/subsystem rewrite in progress or
planned that would require a major version bump, as far as I know. So if
we don't do this, we would either have to (1) effectively feature freeze
the prpls, or (2) bump the major version for libpurple for what could be
a pretty minor change. Both sound worse, by some margin, than this, to
me.

I would like to point out that the code that would use the new macro
(PURPLE_PROTOCOL_PLUGIN_HAS_FUNC) will not be required to be changed
when we bump the major version. So it effectively introduces zero
upgrade cost.

> My 0.02.
> -D

Sadrul