RE: A GNOME Bindings release set?

[Murray Cumming Comneon com]

> From: Arnaud Charlet [mailto:charlet ACT-Europe FR] 
> > > Why?  I don't understand why we would need to force people to
> > > fragment their bindings.  Can you explain the reasoning 
> > > behind this requirement?
> > 
> > So that people can more clearly identify what is a binding for the 
> > GNOME developer platform, and so that we can more clearly identify 
> > whether they are following the API/ABI rules. Modularity is good.
> 
> Actually modularity does not mean separate packages.
> 
> I agree that having to download, extract, build, install lots 
> of separate packages is a pain (and is already a real 
> challenge for gtk+ itself).
> 
> Instead you can have a single distribution (e.g. tarball) and 
> if needed, this dstrib can create multiple libraries for 
> separate components.

I think it's easier for distros to package stuff together than to break it
apart. I don't think people (even developers) should be installing from
source much. It's not the common case.

> For instance for GtkAda, we distribute a single package, that 
> will, based on configure results, build several libraries for 
> gtk, opengl support, libglade, gnome, etc...

But when that is packaged for a distro, you always get the same stuff for
that distro - there is no configure step. 

> So in short, I don't see this as 'a requirement' and would 
> object to this requirement. If it's one possible 
> implementation, then this is of course fine.
> 
> Also another disadvantage of having separate packages is the 
> chance of using incompatible versions that mismatch.

If you follow the API/ABI guidelines then there are no such problems.

> I believe this issue is actually very painful for gnome libs 
> themselves, so let's not make it more painful.

It has been done intentionally for GNOME itself, more now than in the past,
in order to allow moduarity - to allow bugfix releases of small parts
without bundling the new bugs of other parts, and to allow people. I don't
want to build libbonoboui just to get my GTK+ app to work, and your Ada
developers don't want to build Ada's libbonoboui binding just to get their
GtkAda app to work. I'm talking about building from source there, which is
a bit silly, but it shows how difficult it might be to get your stuff
packaged for a distro.

Murray Cumming
www.murrayc.com
murrayc usa net