Re: remove tomboy dependency on gtkspell?

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 09:11 -0400, Joseph E. Sacco, Ph.D. wrote:
> Alex,
> 
> It is my understanding that a "blessed" GNOME application is to be built
> using GNOME-sanctioned tool-chains, frameworks, and applications.
> 
> Other functionality that requires external dependencies not sanctioned
> by GNOME is to made optional.

We also sometimes bless certain modules as external dependencies.
Much of the freedesktop.org platform, such as D-Bus and HAL, is
blessed as an external dependency.

Here are some of the things that should be taken into account
when considering an external dependency:

* Does the module have a relatively stable release?  It does
  not have to follow our release schedule.  But upon each of
  our stable releases, we need to be able to select a version
  of the module to depend on.
* If the module is not hosted on our CVS servers, how well is
  it translated?  It kind of sucks when translators work hard
  to get 100% translation, and then end up seeing messages in
  English because they come from an external library.  We're
  having serious problems right now with our ScrollKeeper
  dependency, for example.
* Is the module free software, and is its license compatible
  with our use of it?
* Are there other modules in our release that provide similar
  functionality?  Then again, we did bless Gecko, even though
  we already had two HTML renderers.  There are a bunch of
  spell checking libraries out there, so if we're going to
  bless one, we need to think hard about it.

There are probably other things to consider as well.  That's
just what I can think of off the top of my head.

--
Shaun