Re: Trying to reach consensus for the proposed modules

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

Il giorno mer, 11/01/2006 alle 15.45 -0700, Elijah Newren ha scritto:
> >
> >
> > gedit 2.13.x also depends on g-p-e, for the new python plugins (like the
> > Snippets Plugin [1]).
> > It requires at least the gtksourceview module, and perhaps the
> > gnome-print bindings (I'm not sure).
> 
> Well, looks like we definitely have a mess to sort out.  (From a quick
> glance at gedit's configure.ac, it looks like it can be removed with a
> simple switch (though my auto-fu sucks so someone else would need to
> verify).  If we don't get this straightened out, the default would
> need to change to have it not included by default.)
> 

Ok, time to shed some light on the situation here:

gedit 2.13 doesn't introduce a 'hard' dependency on g-p-e: in fact if
g-p-e is not installed, gedit builds just fine with python plugins
support disabled. That said we think that python support is a really
important feature and it's having a huge success (I have seen more
plugins in the last month than in the last two years). I'd love that
such support had a more 'official blessing': fedora and ubuntu (I
haven't checked suse) got the dependency right so I am 90% happy, but
having g-p-e as part of the desktop release would be good to encourage
other distros to build gedit with python plugins support enabled.

We talked quite a bit about this with Gustavo (g-p-e maintainer) and we
were also ready to help with splitting pygtksourceview and propose just
that bit for inclusion. Unfortunately things are more complicated:
bindings for gnome-print are in g-p-e too, so any documented based app
atcually needs g-p-e to get serious about python.

Gustavo said that he would be ok with g-p-e in the desktop on the other
hand not all modules included there offer the necessary api stability
guarantees.

The naive way to go at this would be splitting g-p-e in two (things that
could go in the desktop like pygtksourceview, pyapplet etc and things
that are not required for the desktop). However this distinction sounds
extremely artificial to me and would double the workload of making
releases etc. Gustavo made clear that he does not want to maintain two
packages instead of one just because of bureaucratic issues and I
totally agree with him.

So to sum it up, as far gedit is concerned we can leave the things as
they are now leaving up to the distros if they want to include
python-plugin support since the dependency on g-p-e is a soft one.
However I'd greatly prefer if we find a way to give an official blessing
to the use of bindings of libraries which are already part of the
desktop as sourceview or libpanel-applet.


ciao
	Paolo