Re: Solution suggestion [Was: gtk-engines photographed eating children]

[Andrew Johnson <ajgenius ajgenius us>]

On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 17:13 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Andrew Johnson">
> 
> > Smooth has been maintained and for now will continue to be maintained on
> > SF, it is in gtk-engines only too get it out of gnome-themes and
> > gnome-themes-extras not because I want to maintain it there. I will
> > continue to keep it in sync with the latest stable release + bug fixes but
> > generally speaking it only complicates things. It has its own version
> > which it will continue to keep, and I hope gets followed, right now it is
> > at 0.6, with a quick bug fix release of 0.6.0.1 going to be released once
> > I get a chance.
> 
> So why on earth are we duplicating the code in gtk-engines? You're actually
> doing work to sync with code that is correctly and sensibly maintained
> elsewhere. It means we have 0.6 and 2.10 versions hanging around (because it
> is the version of the gtk-engines tarball release that matters, nothing
> else).
> 
> It's reasonable that we have a bunch of engines primarily being maintained
> in the one module, but it is not at all sensible for us to be duplicating
> code and slapping new version numbers on it.
> 
> I suggest only shipping code that is primarily maintained in gtk-engines,
> and leaving the other upstreams to release their code under their own terms.

As I said. I don't want it there but last GNOME release I wasn't
thinking ahead when I let it make it into gnome-themes, and I never
thought at all when I let it get into gnome-themes-extras last year.
Paying the price with mayhem and multiple patches to multiple locations.
Not again.... It went into gtk-engines to solve that problem for those
building from source without the benefit of sanity.

I am not going out of my way to maintain it, just add a few minor bug
fixes so it doesn't get bug reports about things I already fixed in
official stable branch on which its based.

For binary purposes I expect people to disable it from gtk-engines and
depend on smooth packages based on official smooth releases, with
official smooth version numbers. 

For all practical packaging purposes you should pretend it isn't even
there. I am quite sure I even said or implied this in the gtk-engines
README. Maybe I simply need to clarify the README more.. 

And then perhaps rename the file to
UNDER_NO_CIRCUMSTANCES_SHOULD_YOU_READ_THIS so it actually has a chance
of being read. ;)

Andrew