Re: new dependencies in gvfs

[Luca Ferretti <elle uca libero it>]

2009/5/31 Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>:
> On Sun, 2009-05-31 at 10:37 +0200, Luca Ferretti wrote:
>
>> I know this is temporary, that sooner or later distro will include
>> needed stuff, but in next 6 months the only _stable_ distro
>> "certified" to test all GNOME 2.27 features will be Fedora 11.
>
> I fail to see the point: if another distro really wants to be "bleeding
> edge" enough to allow development on it then it should ship the bleeding
> edge dependencies. it's always been as simple as that.
>
> we're not talking about GNOME components here: we're talking about
> system level libraries; it happened with HAL, it happened with D-Bus,

Great. this is exactly my point! Are system level libraries a kind of
external deps that we could request to be "bleeding edge"?

And please, don't assume I'm speaking for some distro, I'm speaking
for GNOME community people, people that could like to run jhbuild on
their fresh released and installed distro, whatever this is,  in order
to test, hack, check, improve, learn about the changes that will
happen in next 6 months. Without breaking their base system, of
course.

Example: in previous (2.25) release cycle gnome-session and
gnome-screensaver was updated to use a feature available only in
unstable and not yet released Xorg 1.6 (or vice versa, I don't
remember exactly). In order to have a working session via jhbuild, I
was forced to produce a custom, patched version of Xorg server for my
own.

This approach, IMHO, reduces the validity and utility of "external
deps" approach.

Now, we have two conflicting options:
   1 - declare "bleeding egde" system libs needed to have a better,
great desktop experience: this means that people that want to test
latest features will have to manually "fix" their base system if some
stuff is not available in their distro ("do you want to test GNOME?
well, change your base")
   2 - don't put "bleeding edge" system libs in external deps until
they are not released/adopted: I suppose you disagree this
conservative approach, but GNOME vs distro IMHO is like egg vs
chicken: who shoud follow who?

I'm not proposing a solution. I don't know which option is better, I
even don't know how to judge "better" here. But I feel we need some
kind of policy to evaluate the inclusion or update of non-optional
dependencies to "bleeding edge" for system libraries that you can't
manage via jhbuild (or similar non-invasive approach)

Cheers, Luca