Re: ftp.gnome.org diffs ?

[Frédéric L. W. Meunier <fredlwm gmail com>]

> On Thu, 24 Mar 2011 20:04:28 +0100, Olav Vitters wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 11:41:01PM -0300, Frédéric L. W. Meunier wrote:
> > I don't know it this is the right list, but I'd like to know what
> > happened to the patches created between releases, which were
> > uploaded to ftp.gnome.org and mirrors.
> >
> > Were they intentionally dropped because a small amount of users
> > downloaded them ?

> This should be discussed on gnome-infastructure.

> I dropped the diffs because:
> 1) Diffs only contained code, not translation changes
> 2) Diffs were not generated when there are binary changes (images)
> 3) Working on a totally new install-module, and try to keep the
> functionality to a minimum


> What is your need/purpose / how did you use them?

As I recall, all translation updates were included in the diffs, but 
obviously not in binary form. Because I use --disable-nls almost 
everywhere, I don't know if they were updated during the compilation, if 
you had gettext installed.

My purpose was to not have to download tons of megabytes all the time. 
You would ask 'Why not use git ?'. I have two main reasons:

1- It takes a lot of space. If you're not developing, it doesn't make 
much sense to maintain full local repositories, At least, it didn't 
some years ago, when hard drives weren't that cheap.

2- You need to always run autogen.sh.

With the tarballs, there was still a problem, because patch would update 
configure.ac after configure. I don't know why that was done, since all 
other files, like Makefile.in, were also updated. The solution was to 
touch configure, so that it wouldn't recreate that file.

But I understand the change you made. I really think that only a few 
people were using the diffs to update their sources.