Oxide 1.3.4-0ubuntu0.14.10.1 in RTM has a possible ABI break in its QML plugin

[Ricardo Mendoza]

With the latest landing in RTM (1.3.4-0ubuntu0.14.10.1) Oxide seems to have an ABI break in its QML plugin.

This deduction comes from webbrowser-app exhibiting broken behaviour which fixes itself when the QML cache is wiped. The QML cache on device makes assumptions about ABI stability for QML plugins regarding ordering of property helpers and order of invokables, as well as the placement of any static data that comes with the provider class. If there is no bump in the version of the QML plugin when a change happens, odd behaviour like this can result.

Its worth to investigate if there is indeed an ABI change in the QML plugin code that would cause the property cache of the QML tree to differ from the previous version, and if so, bump the plugin's minor version.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

The plugin’s minor version was bumped (to 1.3), but of course applications can still import the old version (and should be able to).

I.e. properties that are new in 1.3 can be used only when importing com.canonical.Oxide 1.3, whereas properties that were there before can still be used by importing com.canonical.Oxide 1.0.

Since the browser isn’t using any of the new properties yet, the import of oxide wasn’t bumped there, it’s still importing com.canonical.Oxide 1.0 (and there’s no good reason for bumping the import until it starts using new properties).