Re: Defining "public interfaces" in specifications

On 30 Oct 2002, Eric van der Vlist wrote:

> Yes, that's what I meant saying that unique identifiers would be
> given to these public interfaces. It would become much easier to
> evaluate the impact of changing one them.

Any normative piece of a spec is a public interface. Unique (within a
spec) identifiers should be given to sufficiently large or important
normative pieces of a spec.  It should be up to the authors to decide
what is "sufficiently large or important". I hope SpecGL already has a
general requirement for labeling normative pieces. If SpecGL does not,
it must be added.

It would be desirable for identical concepts in two specs (e.g., two
versions of a spec) to have identical identifiers, but we should not
require that. I think we already agreed that normative pieces should
be "easy to find" in a spec. That's sufficient. It is impossible to
automate backward compatibility verification process anyway.

I see no need to introduce a new concept of "public interface" or a
new "public interface registry". Your examples do not show [me] how
these new things will help or even how they would make any difference.

Alex.

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Received on Wednesday, 30 October 2002 11:36:40 UTC