On Jun 7, 2013, at 5:06 AM, ph10@??? wrote:
> ...There are two possible ways of
> releasing a new API, and this is where we would like some consumer feedback.
>
> 1. Release an entirely new library...
> 2. Release a library that somehow supports both APIs, probably with some kind
> of "wrapper"...
You could do whichever is easiest for you (the developers) and will lead to the best library, without worrying about backward compatibility. I imagine that would be "1".
(Later it might turn out that producing a wrapper "2" would still be easy enough and someone would do it anyway.)
The library name could stay the same. There's no law that new versions have to be backward-compatible with old versions. (For example, FreeType 2 is not backward-compatible with FreeType 1.x.) The function names should be changed to avoid namespace conflicts (leaving open the possibility for wrappers with the old names, or linking with both old and new libraries).
Our software uses PCRE in a simple way, calling only four functions: pcre_version, pcre_compile2, pcre_exec, and pcre_free, each only at one place in our source code, so I imagine we could adapt to a new API without much difficulty.
Of course, other PCRE users may see it differently.
Best wishes,
Tom
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