Re: Use of maintainer mode in GNOME modules

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

hi,

On Wed, 2011-09-14 at 12:22 +0100, Ross Burton wrote:
> Because maintainer mode existing is really annoying when you are a
> packager, and tying arbitrary unrelated changes to an option that is
> documented as only changing the make rules is just wrong.
> 
>  --enable-maintainer-mode  enable make rules and dependencies not useful
>                          (and sometimes confusing) to the casual installer
> 
> Options should do one clearly defined thing. What if a packager needs
> maintainer mode off but wants the GTK+ integration?

I really agree with this point.  We're currently suffering because
gnome-common also ties maintainer mode to the enabling of deprecation
checks and we're not sure we want these to be enabled by default for
casual tarball downloaders.

My suggestion to anyone affected by any issues tied to side effects of
maintainer mode is to either create a new flag to control these effects
directly or, if unable to do so now, to temporarily revert the
'([enable])' patch until such a time as it is practical.

Cheers