Re: Licensing and the library version of git

From: David Lang <dlang@digitalinsight.com>
Date: Jul 27, 2006, 19:49 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0607271245200.11436@qynat.qvtvafvgr.pbz>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0607271232090.4168@g5.osdl.org>

On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote:

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> On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, David Lang wrote:
>>
>>> (*) I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer
>>> and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures
>>> more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers
>>> worry about data structures and their relationships.
>>
>> personally I'd add to this that after the data structures are defined and you
>> turn to the code the API is significantly more important then the code itself.
>
> I think people sometimes put too much emphasis on ABI's.

I was careful to say aPi, not aBi :-)

> Sure, if you're depending on a library, the ABI is supremely important.
> But I literally believe that one of the things that makes open source
> technically superior to most other projects is the fact that ABI's can be
> changed more easily, and sometimes at all.

very true

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> If you have good data structures, the ABI's are largely irrelevant, and if
> you have a problem with an existing ABI, you can just write a new
> entrypoint instead (and leave the old ABI alone).
>
> On the other hand, if you have bad datastructures, the ABI often reflects
> that, and having the balls to say that your ABI's are broken and need to
> be re-done in order to fix the data structures is _very_ important.
> Otherwise you'll never be able to fix anything.

however it's possible to have a good data structure and a bad API. I'm just emphisising the API over the 'elegance', etc of the code that implements it.

Show 7 quoted lines

> So I think that ABI's are often _way_ overhyped. If they are good,
> everybody is happy. But if the interfaces are bad, you had better be
> willing to just say "screw the ABI" and just fix it.
>
> Now, that doesn't mean that you should change ABI's on a whim, and
> regardless of any other issues, your user base is always important. But I
> don't think ABI's are, or should be, "sacred".

I'm not meaning to imply in any way that API's are sacred, just that they are very important and deserve a lot of thought before implementation.

David Lang