Re: Use of maintainer mode in GNOME modules

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Fri, 2011-09-09 at 13:09 +0100, Javier Jardón wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> As you can read in the Ryan blog post [1], the use of the
> AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro is only correct when used in this way:
> 
> AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable])
> 
> As ryan said in the blog post, fredp made a report page for packages
> using AM_MAINTAINER_MODE.
> 
> green  -> no “AM_MAINTAINER_MODE” at all (good)
> yellow -> “AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable])”  (fine)
> orange -> means that your package is currently broken and needs to be fixed.
> 
> So if Its not already fixed in your module, we are going to proced to
> fix all the GNOME modules that appear
> in "orange" and convert it to "yellow", ie
> 
> AM_MAINTAINER_MODE -> AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable])
> 
> Thanks for you collaboration.
> 
> [1] http://blogs.gnome.org/desrt/2011/09/08/am_maintainer_mode-is-not-cool/
> [2] http://people.gnome.org/~fpeters/reports/maintainer-mode.html

We don't really want this change in the gtkmm (and friends) modules.
Chaning AM_MAINTAINER_MODE to AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable]) will change
the default behaviour in tarball builds.

We currently ship generated C++ files and HTML documentation files in
our tarballs. Distro packagers generally don't want to regenerate those
files because a) It's unnecessary and b) It requires extra build tools.

We don't want distro packagers to regenerate the files because there is
a risk that the output will not be the same if they have slightly
different versions of the dependencies, including newer versions. It can
even risk breaking ABI. Distro packagers don't want that either.

If, for some reason, distro packagers do want to turn this off, they
already can with the configure option.

So, for *mm modules, it doesn't seem to be a change that would actually
help anybody in the real world, though it risks causing real problems.


Theoretically we might not be doing things in the right way, but then it
would be up to someone to fix things properly instead of just breaking
our modules. 


We have seen you make this change at least once without asking the
maintainer:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gdlmm/commit/?id=3272c0aa3008654e54b6fd68af8c324db3ee72f8
even though this has not apparently been approved yet as a gnome-wide
goal.

-- 
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com