Re: external dependencies

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

Hi David,

On 9/13/06, David Zeuthen <david fubar dk> wrote:
> It's really what audience we want to optimize for. There are (at least)
> two groups of entities that provide the GNOME experience to users;
<snip>
> This of course is only one example. I submit this is a trade off and it
> really depends on who we want to optimize for.

No, this issue is bigger than target audience.  Testers, documenters,
and developers often need a development version of GNOME to get their
work done.  Requiring them to have very recent versions of nearly
everything on their system is much too high a bar.  In fact, the
building bar is so high right now that I believe nearly everything
else in GNOME is currently suffering; the difficulty of building GNOME
has even taken a large amount of time from some of the more
experienced developers.  (Note that I'm by no means just blaming HAL
here; we have lots of issues.  External dependencies in general have
been the biggest problems in the build area in the recent past, thus
the proposal to stop depending on cvs versions of those.)

> Actually I think one answer to this whole mess might be to make
> GARNOME / jhbuild just use the OS provided versions of HAL and D-BUS.
> Each module that happens to use HAL would have it's own minimum version
> of HAL required and if that version is not met then it either
>
>  1) builds without HAL support;
>  2) refuse to build
>
> and ditto for other non-GNOME deps such as Avahi, CUPS and possibly even
> Mozilla, X.org and so forth. Certainly jhbuild and GARNOME ought to be
> able to do that, yes?
>
> I think this is the best compromise, I'm curious what others think.

Something like this looks like a good compromise to me.  I think there
may be too many modules with a hard dependency on a newer version of
dbus to use distributor versions of it for now; however, it may work
out for HAL.

Cheers,
Elijah