HEAD vs. stable

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> We have yet another GNOME 2 writeup, to add to Jacob's and
> Miguel's. There are some significant points of disagreement here, I'd
> say let's discuss for the next few weeks, and at GUADEC we'll sort it
> all out.
> 
> Maciej put it up here:
>   http://canvas.gnome.org/~mjs/proposal.html
> 
> 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. 
> 

Another major point of difference is our proposal to start from
gnome-libs HEAD instead of the stable branch. As a proof of concept,
Martin did an experimental set of tarballs that prove that going this
way, we could have the whole GNOME platform set up and working
together with about a week of work, mostly creating new modules and
setting up branches. This would leave plenty of time to review API
changes (and for that matter the GNOME 1.x APIs) by the July 31 hard
freeze deadline.

On the other hand, starting from stable would take lots of time just
to get everything compiling together, before any kind of serious work
could even begin, and there isn't a clear detailed work plan for going
this way.

This is a bit more of a minor point than the library factoring., as
it's more a question of implementation, but I think it's still
important, because if we want to get GNOME 2.0 out this year, we have
to take the most efficient engineering path.

I invite people to discuss this point.

 - Maciej