Re: libcanberra as an external dependency

[Joe Marcus Clarke <marcus freebsd org>]

Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-08-07 at 12:52 -0400, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:
> > Ross Burton wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2008-08-07 at 12:25 -0400, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:
> > > > While esd may be considered old, it's not exotic.  It is THE sound 
> > > > server for GNOME right now.
> > > It is the *deprecated* sound server for GNOME.  We don't complain when
> > > applications stop linking to libgnomeui because they can use modern
> > > replacements, so I don't see the problem here.
> > But the modern replacements for libgnomeui are blessed GNOME 
> > dependencies.  I don't see pulseaudio listed in the platform, desktop, 
> > or external dependency lists.
>
> We're trying to kill esound completely, and having the release-team look
> in the other direction when we're adding those new dependencies is the
> easiest way for us to move in that direction.
>
> In any cases, it's the distributor's decision which sound server to use,
> but I wouldn't want to be the one wasting (a small amount of) time
> writing an esound backend for libcanberra.

So what's the point of even having dependency lists?  This seems like 
broken release engineering to me.  We're going to bless one sound 
server, but no one actually use it.  Instead, introduce support for 
another.  Maybe that way people will see the light, and switch on their 
own.  That seems like a pretty passive-aggressive approach by the 
release team.  If you want to move something better, do it.  You did it 
for gvfs and gtkprint.

Being a porter of GNOME to an alternate platform, I rely on the 
dependency lists to figure out what I need to make sure works.  It's 
hard enough working out all the existing Linuxisms without having to 
juggle hidden meanings.  It's just really frustrating.

Joe

--
Joe Marcus Clarke
FreeBSD GNOME Team	::	gnome FreeBSD org
FreeNode / #freebsd-gnome
http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome