Re: GNOME 2.0 Platform Alpha Deadline - Sep 26, 2001

[Bill Gribble <grib linuxdevel com>]

On Tue, 2001-09-18 at 14:29, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Anyhow, I think we need to do a better job of communicating just how
> totally unsupported things like GAL and eel really are. These are not
> for general use; they change soname all the time (or if they don't
> they should), they are going to be subject to massive deprecation as
> we move the platform forward, they add and remove interfaces, etc.

I guess I'm not being very clear, sorry. Here's a listing of the
packages in Debian that depend on libgal being installed.  As far as I
can tell, it's a good fraction of the major GNOME applications.

$ grep-dctrl -F depends -s package libgal /var/lib/dpkg/available
package: gnucash
package: libcamel0
package: gtkhtml
package: gnuvd-gnome
package: encompass
package: sodipodi
package: libcamel-ssl0
package: libgal-dev
package: gnumeric
package: evolution-ssl
package: red-carpet
package: pan
package: python-gnome
package: libgal-data
package: balsa
package: procman
package: gtranslator
package: libgtkhtml15
package: mrproject
package: gnomesword
package: evolution
package: libgtkhtml-perl
package: screem
package: ximian-setup-tools

I don't know how many of these use libgal directly.  gnucash certainly
doesn't, but we rely on gtkhtml, so we must link against libgal. If the
need for the packages above to link against libgal is eliminated by
other aspects of GNOME-2.0, then I don't give a fig if libgal is part of
GNOME-2.0.   It's just not clear to me that that's the case, and if it's
not, it seems silly to claim that libgal isn't part of the core of
GNOME, because every major GNOME application I can think of save
Nautilus links against it, and it links against libgnome. 

b.g.