Re: Removing libgnomeprint* from the desktop set

[Mike Kestner <mkestner gmail com>]

On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 19:58 -0600, Elijah Newren wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 10:12 AM, Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org> wrote:
> >  I'd like us to finally stop shipping libgnomeprint/libgnomeprintui as
> >  part of the desktop set. As far as I can tell from the jhbuild
> >  moduleset, it's only used by:
> >
> >   + anjuta, with the scintilla editor plugin (but there's the
> >    gtksourceview editor plugin)
> >   + tomboy: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=512369
> >   + gnome-python-desktop, for bindings
> >   + gnome-sharp, for bindings
> >   + gtksourceview 1.x, which I'd like to kill :-) see previous mail for
> >    this.
> >
> >  Opinions?
> 
> Sounds like a good idea to me.  :-)

I'm fairly confident that this post is a waste of electrons, but I'll go
on record as saying I don't think it's a good idea.

I know there are no stability guarantees in the desktop release.  They
are however the kind of general purpose APIs that many classes of
applications could, and most likely did, take advantage of, and removing
them just seems to be a potential pain causer for little benefit.  

Just because the desktop release can break stability doesn't necessarily
mean it should.  I understand the desktop library policy in the context
of small limited-use libraries shared between desktop-only components.
Putting a general-use library in the desktop release set and
indiscriminately breaking its API or removing it from the set seems
counterproductive to me.

What exactly is the cost to GNOME of leaving a deprecated unmaintained
library in the release set?


-- 
Mike Kestner <mkestner gmail com>