[Gambas-user] Re: [Gambas-devel] About next Gambas version

[Rob]

On Friday 07 January 2005 06:48, José "L. Redrejo" Rodríguez 
wrote:
> I wouldn't like to see gbx, gbx2,gbx3 and so on in the
> following releases. Or if they exist, I think at least there
> should be a diversion with soft links from gbx to the gbxN the
> users wants, as it happens with gcc.
> Because.. projects made with the actual gambas version will
> run with the new runtime, won't them?. In that case, these

I remember porting a VB3 program to VB6.  That wasn't pretty, but 
at least VB's runtime DLLs are renamed with each version.  
Gambas being an interpreted language at present means that the 
most direct equivalent to vbrun*.dll is gbx, so I think that 
needs to be renamed.

I can only imagine that Gambas will change significantly between 
major releases and possibly break source compatibility, just as 
Qt, Gtk and even gcc do.  Unlike gcc, though, gbx needs to be 
present on target machines and therefore the symlink and 
/etc/alternatives stuff would likely be harmful.

One cute way of doing it would be to repackage gbx as gbx1 when 
gbx2 comes out, and change gbx to a "switcher" program that 
somehow determines which version of gbx is needed and attempts 
to run it.

Rob