Re: more gnome 2 proposal

[Alex Graveley <alex ximian com>]

Hi,

On 10 Mar 2001 18:39:56 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> I think the largest and most substantive point of disagreement right
> now is library packaging, i.e. lots of small modules vs. two big
> modules. 

My personal view is that this is a major mistake. You run the risk of
continuing the tradition of difficult builds and complex dependencies.

Keeping everything in one or two modules is nearly guaranteed to fix
both
problems.

It is important to keep in mind that having everything in one or two CVS
modules does not in any way influence our ability to generate as many
libraries as we want, or as many binary package descriptions that make
sense. It also does not hinder the ability to have a maintainer for a
given
functional area.

Your major argument for further splitting the tree is that if bugs are
fixed
in, for instance, ZVT, it would be necessary to wait until the next
major
release of Gnome. This is not the case as new tarballs could be pushed
every
month or so with only bug fixes and a bumped build number. Keeping the
API
frozen between major releases is key, but this is what everyone is
already
advocating.

What this does mean is that development for Gnome becomes a hard target
for
third-parties. You would be able to develop against the currently
released
frozen Gnome API, not whichever API is current for a module, or
whichever
version of packages a given distibution decides to ship.

In addition this means that complex bugs become easier to track as you
can
narrow bugs to between major or build releases, not a certain version of
libgnome, a certain version of libgnomeui, a certain version of
libgnomecanvas, etc.

Also, I believe that blurring the lines between existing core modules
makes
for a more uniform interpretation of Gnome, one which would allow
contributors to easily come up to speed and start working.

-Alex

-- 
 make: *** No rule to make target `sense'.  Stop.