Re: Swfdec: required external packages

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 22:34 -0700, Elijah Newren wrote:
> On Jan 29, 2008 12:32 PM, Benjamin Otte <otte gnome org> wrote:
> > I looked into jhbuild and external deps are always tarballs. So I was
> > wondering if there was a policy against depending on development
> > versions for external deps. It's a bit more work for jhbuilders after
> > all.
> > Otherwise I'd update the modules to depend on Swfdec git until 0.6.0 is out.
> 
> Yes, this was a very deliberate policy decision.  Tracking
> svn/cvs/git/whatever of external dependencies made gnome essentially
> unbuildable a few cycles back.  It wasn't just SoC students spending
> their first three *weeks* trying to do nothing but get Gnome to build,
> we had lots of developers saying they couldn't complete the task
> either and couldn't test their own module against current svn of other
> modules.  Despite updating my build several times a week, even I was
> struggling to keep things built.  It was a nightmare.

Add to that our writers.  You have to be able to run the
latest Gnome to write documentation about it, and building
the latest Gnome is enough of a pain as it is.  I can't
even tell you how many potential contributors we've lost
because it's just too damn hard to get up and running.

--
Shaun