Re: Why is gstreamer not an external dependency?

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

On 5/20/07, Jaap Haitsma <jaap haitsma org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Since external dependencies like hal, dbus, cairo etc. are built from
> tarballs it's much easier to build gnome with jhbuild.
>
> I was wondering why gstreamer does not get build from tarballs,
> because also gstreamer does not follow the gnome release cycle.

Nor does gtk+, librsvg, libxml2, libxslt, ekiga, libglade, and
probably other modules[1].  Your question is a good one, but the issue
is a bit wider than just one particular module: when should we make
something a blessed external dependency, and when should it be part of
GNOME?  I think gstreamer, librsv, libxml2, and libxslt may make sense
as e.g. freedesktop modules that are considered external dependencies
(I'm not proposing that, btw, just saying that I don't see any
problems it would cause if others wanted that), but I think all the
other ones in my above list make much more since inside GNOME release
sets.

Definitely a good question to mull over.  I don't have a good answer.
Maybe someone else does.

Cheers,
Elijah

[1] An attempt to document this:
http://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning/SeparateReleaseCycleModules