Re: external dependencies

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

On 9/11/06, Matthias Clasen <mclasen redhat com> wrote:
> The topic came up earlier, and I think there was a general consensus
> that it is a good idea to freeze the versions of external dependencies,
> and use tarball modules for them in the gnome-2.18 moduleset in jhbuild.
>
> I see that we already do that for hal, with the hal-0-5-7 id.
> fontconfig 2.4.0 has just been released, so I'd propose that we do the
> same for fontconfig now, and then follow with dbus, as soon as 1.0 is
> released (which should be soon now).

There was also a very strong sentiment that we should tighten up on
the addition of new dependencies, moving to a must-be-approved-first
rule for adding new dependencies.  I think doing such, in combination
with freezing dependencies to specific versions[1], is necessary to
fix the ridiculousness of the current build situation[2].

I've put together a _preliminary_ page to help push these two ideas
along at http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointSeventeen/ExternalDependencies.
There may be inaccuracies or omissions there, but it has the basics
already.  Thoughts?  Comments?

> There is a slight problem with doing this version freezing by changing
> the ids, since it messes up dependencies (unless we add some from of
> "provides" to jhbuild modules) - e.g. the hal-0-5-7 modules requires
> "dbus", so if we freeze dbus as "dbus-1-0", the "dbus" dependency will
> not be satisfied by it.

Maybe a freedesktop-2.18.modules would be a good idea?  I kind of
doubt gnome-2.14.modules would currently really build right now, given
that freedesktop is such a moving target anyway...

Elijah


[1] Though with allowances for updating to a newer (but still frozen)
version when needed, as mentioned on the proposal page I created.
Also, there may be reason to actually depend on CVS of some external
modules; I think it'd be a bad idea in general, but may merit a
case-by-case consideration.
[2] See e.g. this thread:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-August/msg00113.html