Re: more gnome 2 proposal

[Alex Graveley <alex ximian com>]

Hi,

Sorry for the bad formatting, let me repost...

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.