Re: external dependency process

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 1:03 PM, Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca> wrote:
> hi release team,

Hey, thanks for the request - at least we have communication between
the board and the release team :-)

I'll repeat some comments I made earlier in private discussion:

- At the end of the day, the most official 'list of modules' we have
is the jhbuild modulesets that we use to build the actual releases.
There's a lot of redundancy and overhead in manually maintaining
separate copies of that in wiki pages.

- The 'external dependency list' and the 'module approval process' of
the 2.x era were entirely focused on modules and dependencies -
something that is near and dear to packagers and distributors. But it
kinda detracts from the user experience and features that we want to
deliver. Which is why we've been trying out the feature page approach
for the 3.x releases.

- The 'external dependency list' has some inherent problems, such as
the fact that very often the boundary is fluid; desktop components get
co-developed with the underlying infrastructure. Having a very strict
boundary 'at the bottom' of our stack makes it easier to supplant the
desktop on different OSes and get something that somehow works. But
also makes it harder to create a tightly integrated  experience.

- I think keeping track of (and to some level, controlling)
dependencies does fall within the purview of the release team, and we
should investigate how to bring it back in some form.


Matthias