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

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

Andrew Johnson wrote:

> 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.. 
>  
So if the smooth engine is a new feature for the gtk-engines module, and 
should not be used by distributors, wouldn't it make sense to remove it?

It seems particularly bad if it isn't going to stay in sync with 
upstream releases.

James.