On Mon, Jan 03, 2005 at 05:03:38AM -0600, Derek P. Moore wrote:
You brought up the issue of the dialogs in the Gtkmm code. That actually helps to illustrate my point. There's almost no way to migrate the new dialogs and dialog manager down into the legacy codebase. We could certainly put that work in some subdirectory of the main tree, and have configure/compile options to use the new stuff instead of the old. But within that single tree, we'd then have two dialogs for everything until the old dialogs were entirely ripped out and the compile options for the old stuff were removed. So developers would still have the problem of having to edit two separate dialogs in two separate locations just to uniformly add a checkbox to "Align and Distribute".
As mental said, having the files near eachother helps reduce divergance. It's doesn't solve it, but I'd say it's better than two separate trees.
As far as deep changes, I think that's okay and good. One deep change at a time is better than many deep changes at once. (Although I still haven't done the giant white-space replacement I had threatened to do so long ago...) :)
PS: I don't mean to scare up any FUD by introducing this thread. I don't think we have to worry much about a "divergence" between the two codebases or other such concerns that have come up with regard to the Gtkmm work.
That's cool; I think it's a valid discussion. And I think it's potentially a religious issue. More of the devels on Inkscape are comfortable with a single tree, which means your idea is met with resistance. I think either way will work, but my suspicion is that a merge now will save time in the long run (based on my estimations of the skills and attitudes of the other developers). So, speaking for myself obviously, my recommendation isn't based on the merit of "all coding must be in HEAD", but rather "inkscape developers seem to work best when all coding is done in HEAD".