On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 12:31:39PM -0500, Aaron Spike wrote:
Bryce Harrington wrote:
That said, I think if you wish to merge this branch into main, it would be wisest to make your code only relies on a released version of lib2geom (which may mean working to get a release of lib2geom.)
Such a requirement is going to force lib2geom to release new versions weekly or even more rapidly.
You trimmed it out, but I said this could be achieved with svn extern.
I never said making it depend on released versions was a requirement, just that it would be a wiser approach. But please note that linking svn's ALSO places a burden on lib2geom in that it would instead require that lib2geom svn remain always buildable. In theory that should not ever be an issue, but imagine if a build issue does enter into lib2geom; since only lib2geom developers with commit access to that project's svn would be able to fix it, it could result in a situation where inkscape development would effectively grind to a halt waiting for a fix.
Of course, this will likely never happen because lib2geom developers would never commit build errors into svn. It is fortunate that a few inkscape developers have commit access into lib2geom; hopefully they will take the responsibility of quickly fixing issues if they are identified, and this issue will never become a problem.
I imagine there could also be other potential glitches. Both projects use different svn providers, so now instead of just relying on inkscape svn being functional, we now require two svn servers to be up and functioning at the same time. And so on. In theory, everything will work perfectly, but in practice...
This is why I feel that when possible, it is wiser to rely on stable releases. This doesn't mean forcing upstream to release frequently; it means being organized in when features are rolled out that require features only available in the upstream SVN. It's the same philosophy we would apply with relying on cairo, gtkmm, or other upstream library changes. If everyone feels that it is not possible to apply this philosophy in this case, well then this would be an allowable exception.
To be honest it doesn't really matter to me; I've been too busy with the new job to work on Inkscape anyway. If those who are actively developing on this are willing to experiment with linking svn's with an external project, then if the above concerns are legitimate, I'm sure they'll make themselves clear and people can deal with them then. Patch first, discuss later as we always say. ;-)
Bryce