Re: gvfs basic testing

[Hans Petter Jansson <hpj novell com>]

On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 17:05 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:

> You should be aware that GVfs does not yet support out-of-tree backends
> (that's one reason there's no development or files or documentation
> installed as part of 'make install'). In other words, assume that the
> protocol between the gvfs daemon and the mount daemon can _and_ will
> change maybe even in minor releases. Backends in the tree are fine, if
> we make a protocol change or whatever, we just fix up all the backends.
> 
> At some point I _think_ [1] we want to provide a stable ABI, however at
> this point I'm pretty sure we're not ready to make such a commitment.
> 
> [1] : but of course it's up to Alex if he wants to provide a stable ABI.
> Just FWIW, I'd be 100% supportive if Alex don't want to provide one;
> maintaining an ABI really sucks.

Agreed; but on the other hand, I've seen several requests for
out-of-tree backend support. If Alex chooses to not support that, we
should be prepared to either let some backends that we'd usually
consider "oddball" into the main tree, or deal with bug reports stemming
from downstream's patched-in backends.

No solution is maintenance-free, so the question is "what would cause
the least pain?". I'm leaning towards out-of-tree backend support
myself, especially since I think we'd see many interesting backends pop
up that way, and it encourages experimentation.

-- 
Hans Petter