Re: Removing libgnomeprint* from the desktop set

[Mike Kestner <mkestner gmail com>]

On Mon, 2008-03-31 at 17:56 +0200, Matteo Settenvini wrote:

> I believe the point is exactly that it's deprecated and unmaintained.
> Putting it outside of GNOME gives a strong signal to developers.

For the record, that wasn't a rhetorical question.  I was looking for
actual cost to the team or platform, as in effort or platform
performance.  Not theoretical signals sent to developers.  I'm also not
convinced that the signal "hold on to your hats, cause GNOME is going to
change under you at our whim" is the optimal signal to send.  Even for a
desktop library.

> However, this doesn't mean that library can't continue living its own
> life outside of GNOME: it can still be packaged for a distro, or shipped
> along with a third-party application.

It just means extra work, and confusion as to whether it "should" be
done since it's not in GNOME any more, etc... 

> If the application in question is still actively developed, porting the
> old code to the new one shouldn't be too much a hassle; it's not as if
> you're removing any functionality to the platform, just saying "move on
> to the next version, it's better and more stable and people will work on
> it".

It tells application developers who use GNOME that you _have_ to invest
effort into your application to keep its current feature set with the
current GNOME release.  Effort that could otherwise be invested in
potentially more worthwhile features.  

Instead of continuing this discussion I should probably have invested
the time in figuring out how I can maintain stability for gnome-sharp's
users in the face of this removal.  Most people won't be worried about
that, since it's my fault for depending on an unstable library, but it's
effort I could be spending elsewhere to make GNOME more available to
mono users.

-- 
Mike Kestner <mkestner gmail com>