Re: staging libraries

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Sun, 2002-02-24 at 20:18, Darin Adler wrote:
> On 2/24/02 5:54 PM, "Jody Goldberg" <jody gnome org> wrote:
> 
> > I'll chime in on this.  Although I understand the control issues
> > that make having multiple staging libraries convenient,  IMO having
> > multiple sets of libraries is detrimental to the project.
> 
> Principles aside, my experience with eel has been positive. I didn't favor
> creating it in the first place, because I normally think about end-user
> experience, and for the end-user, it's just another library they have to
> install for no apparent reason to install nautilus.
> 
> But when the stuff that's now in eel was in a private library called
> libnautilus-extensions, it was constantly getting mixed together with truly
> nautilus-specific code. Once it was separated out into eel, it was a lot
> clearer how to draw the line.
> 
> During the Gnome 2 development process, I was able to remove a lot of this
> code much more quickly than I would have been had it been inside the
> Nautilus source tree. But if there were many other eel clients besides
> Nautilus, I'm not sure I could have quickly determined that things weren't
> used, or eradicated all use of them, and then removed them.
> 
> Ramiro did the eel cut very quickly, and there is still plenty more code in
> Nautilus that should be moved there (and he moved at least one thing that
> should not have been moved). This separate step of "moving to eel" and
> teasing out from the rest of the Nautilus code is a great clarifying step
> that helps determine if the code is really good enough to keep around, or
> should just be deleted. I still hope that we can some day tease out
> NautilusIconContainer and some of the other stuff in libnautilus-private.
> 
> On the other hand, having the eel library as a separate package on end
> users' machines hasn't been valuable, and leads to confusion. I don't know
> how to achieve the clarity of separation without having a separate cvs
> module and package. But I do know that having eel has helped make Nautilus
> easier to work on.

CVS includes? *wink*

-Seth