Re: GNOME Icon Theme 2.13.5[.1] AKA the HOLY CRAP, ICONS! release

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Tue, 2006-01-17 at 13:23 -0700, Elijah Newren wrote:
> This shouldn't be looked at as a 'just for Fedora' thing.  Addition of
> external dependencies to release set modules is subject to community
> approval and we do have precedent of not allowing hard dependencies on
> modules that maintainers would have otherwise used.  It only makes
> sense because we don't want an explosion of external dependencies. 
> Given Matthias objection, it is something we'll have to push for
> general consensus on.

Fedora's organization and structure is specific to Fedora. Several
distros are already shipping a theme which depends on icon-naming-utils,
some as the default, and not a single one of them has complained to me
about the dependency on perl-XML-Simple.

As far as modules that otherwise would have been used, there are none
that I would have otherwise used, unless I had written the code in C
instead of perl. I wrote it in perl, because of XML::Simple. It's not
exactly Yet Another Parser as Matthias seems to claim. It is simply an
abstraction on top of XML::Parser, which we already depend on, to make
the handling of XML for simple tasks such as that which
icon-naming-utils undertaks, very easy and simple to code. It's still
using XML::Parser, which is still using expat.

And as for the dependency on icon-naming-utils, I also maintain it, and
there is no other script which handles the task that it does, so it's
not like I picked some random thing and decided "oh, we need to use
this." This is a very much needed tool at this time, and we need to work
on the transition to the new spec now.

If the XML::Simple thing is really that much of a problem, then may who
claims such produce a patch that replaces it with pure XML::Parser, that
may prove fit to supplant the current code in CVS. 

If the icon-naming-utils dependency in total is also really that much of
a problem, then may you supplant gnome-icon-theme 2.13.x with 2.12.1 for
the 2.14 release of GNOME. Or I can backport a few fixes, and release
newer versions of 2.12.x for 2.14 as well.

This was all done in time for feature freeze, because well, it's a
feature. If the latter be the decition of the release team, then so be
it, but HEAD gnome-icon-theme is going to continue moving toward
compliance with the Icon Naming Spec. It needs to be done sooner rather
than later, and the approximately 72 hours I spent working to make it
happen, shall I not let go gently into the night, because of a tiny
little perl module dependency.

-- dobey