Code Interface Stability
From Globus
Public interfaces of technologies included in the Globus Toolkit should be tagged as stable or unstable.
Public interfaces can be classified as stable under the following conditions:
- The public interfaces do not change between incremental releases (4.0.0, 4.0.1, 4.0.2, etc.), and
- Backward compatibility is maintained whenever possible between minor releases (4.0, 4.2, 4.4, etc.)
If these conditions cannot be met, the public interfaces for the technology should be described as unstable.
Public interfaces for a technology include
- command-line tools,
- semantics and syntax of APIs,
- semantics and syntax of WSDL,
- semantics and syntax of domain-specific interfaces (such as RSL),
- configuration interface, and
- environment variables
