Currently there are two reasons for preserving binary compatibility:
- Android Manager package released in Google Play; changes can break several applications relying on this package
- Linux distributions which maintain thier own OpenCV packages; changes can break other packages depending on OpenCV, result in massive package rebuild and complicate dependencies
Although, we've discussed this idea recently, some of the proposals were:
- probably we can drop Android Manager package support
- we should keep source-level compatibility between same major versions
- we can mark obsolete functions as "deprecated" to signal users about future removal
- we can...
- either keep binary-level compatibility between same major.minor versions, for example 3.1.0 => 3.1.1 != 3.2
- either keep binary-level compatibility between same major versions, for example 3.0 => 3.1 => 3.2 != 4.0 (current state)
But none of these decisions has been taken yet. We will be glad to hear any arguments and ideas.
