Changing private symbols to public (was: Re: CVS Update: xc (branch: trunk))

[Alex Deucher]

On Tue, 1 Feb 2005 13:20:32 -0500 (EST), Mike A. Harris
<mharris at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, Keith Packard wrote:
> 
> >Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 09:16:49 -0800
> >From: Keith Packard <keithp at keithp.com>
> >To: Mike A. Harris <mharris at redhat.com>
> >Cc: Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org>, xorg at lists.freedesktop.org,
> >     Keith Packard <keithp at keithp.com>
> >Content-Type: multipart/signed; boundary="==_Exmh_563624921P";
> >        micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp-signature"
> >Subject: Re: Changing private symbols to public (was: Re: CVS Update: xc
> >    (branch: trunk))
> >
> >
> >Around 12 o'clock on Feb 1, "Mike A. Harris" wrote:
> >
> >> Using this logic, every single symbol that isn't explicitly
> >> hidden, is public, and should now be moved to be a public symbol.
> >> That would pretty much expose most if not all internal symbols of
> >> all of the X libraries, as they're not hidden with
> >> attribute((hidden)).
> >
> >No.  This symbol is used in another library which we publish (libSM).
> >
> >That makes all the difference.
> 
> Ok, so there is some concensus behind this one change then.
> That was one of the things I was curious about to begin with,
> however no public discussion seemingly ever occured, so it wasn't
> possible to find that out until I posted my message to the list
> asking about why the change went in, etc.
> 

not to beat a dead horse here, but sometimes someone just has to step
up and do it before you get a discussion.  I can think of plenty of
interesting patches that sit on the xorg ML or in bugzilla waiting for
discussion, but nothing ever happens.  Sometimes people worry too much
about consensus to actually get anything done, so stuff sits waiting
for feedback that never comes.  Sometimes committing a change like
this is enough to get the discussion going so that a concensus can be
reached, otherwise the discussion will never happens and the patch
will remain unmerged.  That's not to say that an annoucement wouldn't
be nice in some cases.  Remember, it's cvs, you can always undo :)

Alex