Re: Clearlooks and GNOME 2.12

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

On 21/07/05 03:45, Thomas Wood wrote:

>
> On 20 Jul 2005, at 11:38 pm, James Henstridge wrote:
>
>> On 20/07/05 19:17, Thomas Wood wrote:
>>
>>> On 19 Jul 2005, at 10:26 pm, Danilo Šegan wrote:
>>>
>>>> Today at 22:42, Richard Stellingwerff wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Personally, I'd really prefer to keep distributing standalone
>>>>> packages, since it allows me to do more frequent releases.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Nobody would object if gtk-engines got more frequent releases. :)
>>>>
>>> In fact, I'm planning a release soon, since I've just closed quite a
>>> number of outstanding bugs.
>>>
>>> Incidentally, this will be the 5th gtk-engines release in 7 months,
>>> compared to no releases in the 2 years previously.
>>
>>
>>
>> Why are you including modules that are maintained externally anyway?
>
>
> I think the original plan was to eventually maintain clearlooks in
> gtk-engines. Clearlooks was still quite experimental at the time, so
> the idea was to have a stable version in gtk-engines, and allow the
> developers to continue experimenting elsewhere. Now that clearlooks is
> more stable, perhaps it would be possible for the developers to have
> cvs access to gtk-engines.

Surely the Clearlooks developers could designate one version stable and
another as in development.  Why does gtk-engines need to come into the
picture.

>> If you find bugs in clearlooks, are you fixing them in gtk-engines or
>> are you feeding them to the official maintainers?  If you are fixing
>> them locally, how are you resolving conflicts when merging later on?
>>
>> It seems like it would remove all these synchronisation problems if
>> gtk-engines only contained engines that were maintained within
>> gtk-engines.  Including a theme whose engine is not in gtk-engines isn't
>> really a bad thing.
>
>
> gtk-engines is already required by gnome-themes, so rather than adding
> yet another dependancy, I think including Clearlooks in gtk-engines
> saves hassle for both users, developers and distributors.

Distributors don't particularly like it when particular functionality is
provided by multiple packages.  They need to patch the functionality out
from one.

With two copies of gtk-themes, a distributor needs to decide which one
to use.  Having two version numbers for the theme (the clearlooks
version and the gtk-themes package version) also produces more work for
the distributor if they decide to switch to the other copy.

With dependency aware package update systems and developer tools like
jhbuild, having clearlooks as a separate tarball/package doesn't seem to
be that much of a hassle for users/developers.

James.