Re: GLIB, libffi and Windows

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi;

On 8 August 2011 10:26, Kean Johnston <kean johnston gmail com> wrote:
>> GLib sources, but the response that I receive is that there is no plans
>> (at least at that time) to include the libFFI sources in the GLib sources,
>> and that was from one of the core devs, AFAICT.
> I wonder if its a philosophical objection or just that no-one has signed up
> to do it. Perhaps one of the core devs can chime in.

the core hackers are at the Desktop Summit, right now.

I can talk about the discussions we had on this in the past: having a
copy of libffi inside a project was necessary in the past because
upstream was not really good at making releases. this has changed, and
having a copy is mostly frowned upon.

I think it would be possible to have a fallback libffi copy, but as
all things it will add a maintenance burden, and with the shortage of
resources that keeps plaguing the gtk project, adding yet another
burden is not going to go well right now.

> I know Windows is a "second class citizen" in the
> GLib world but it would be nice if those of us who depend on it got *SOME*
> love

you're invited to join the public gtk irc team meeting:

  http://live.gnome.org/GTK+/Meetings

and you're welcome to join the discussion on irc in the #gtk+ channel.

asking for "love" without giving anything back in return except
complaints after the fact is not conducive to a positive development
environment. the GLib and GTK+ maintainers are not experts on Windows,
we said that multiple times; hackers with Windows experience should
join if they want to be represented.

> when decisions to add weird dependencies (which aren't even that
> common on Linux) are added.

libffi *is* common on Linux. as I said above, the lack of an existing
package was due to the lack of upstream releases - and issue that has
been solved in the past two/three years.

> The "creeping featurism" of what is supposed to
> be a small, system abstracting library should be cause for concern.

I think you haven't been keeping up to the development of GLib in the
past decade. GLib is a platform library, and has been for a long
while. it's not *just* a small system abstraction library - or at
least, it's not just that any more.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/