Re: external dependencies

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

Hi Matthias,

On Mon, 2006-09-11 at 12:49 -0400, Matthias Clasen 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).

This makes sense to me. Btw, I just put out a new HAL 0.5.8 just minutes
ago. It's been pretty bad this cycle [1] with taking 6-7 months for a
release to appear. So, since I really don't want to repeat that, HAL
will now move to a 3-month release cycle so I expect to put out HAL
0.5.9 sometime in December. Note that we will also grow a hard PolicyKit
dependency as well. However, PolicyKit will be useful for GNOME outside
the context of HAL, but that's another discussion.

So, what's the procedure going to be for requesting GNOME to depend on a
new HAL release? I mean, when is the latest point in the release process
that modules in GNOME can require new HAL releases - up until now, I
just worked with the respective GNOME module maintainers to figure this
out, perhaps we want to formalize this a bit. 

Also, this will certainly make it easier on the distributions since they
won't have to ship HAL git snapshots or cherry pick patches just to get
the latest GNOME release working.

    David


[1] : bad excuse time: I spent my work hours mostly on non-HAL stuff and
figured out I needed to write PolicyKit too. It seems I'll be getting
some more work time to look after the HAL + related bits stuff in the
future though so stay tuned.