Re: Winners of today's build breakages

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

On 7/25/06, Nigel Tao <nigel tao gnome gmail com> wrote:
> > (1) deskbar-applet added a new external dependency (elementtree)
> > without notice being given to d-d-l.  In general we've sucked at
> > letting maintainers know that they need to announce new external
> > dependencies (and that the community needs to agree upon them, though
> > there's an assumed acceptance unless someone voices objection), so we
> > probably can't go too hard on them.  The dependency is probably sane,
> > considering that it looks like it'll be part of python-2.5 anyway.
> > But it, like dependencies added in other modules, should have at least
> > been announced.  :)
>
> Deskbar uses elementtree to parse a really small XML file.  This could
> be easily re-written to use another XML parser, removing this new
> dependency.
>
> Is libxml2 the blessed XML library (if one has been blessed at all)?
> Is it problematic that Deskbar is written in Python - i.e. would
> libxml2's Python bindings be yet another new dependency??

I don't think elementtree is particularly problematic, especially
since it appears that it will be bundled with the next python release
anyway and we already depend on python (so if you had just waited to
depend on elementtree until python 2.5 was released, this _probably_
wouldn't be a new dependency).

Mostly, we just need to get people into the habit of announcing new
dependencies that they want to use, and be aware that the community
might object and require the new dependency to be removed or made
optional (as has happened before, with gnome-system-monitor and
libgksudo or whatever it was called being the first example that comes
to mind).