Sync with gnome releases

Derek Atkins warlord@MIT.EDU
20 Jul 2001 10:23:10 -0400


linas@linas.org (Linas Vepstas) writes:

> Well, in some attempt at defense of our actions ... we decided that we
> really couldn't live without the latest guile, gtkhtml and gnome-print.
> It would have been to painful, too brain-damaged to try to live with
> older versions of these things.  Hopefully, that will settle down.

I hope so, too..

> Now, of course, I dunno what happens if/when we decide to manage accounts
> and vendor lists with e.g. the gnome addressbook. Hopefully, its 'stable'
> but we may find that we are the very first to ever use it in mode 'xyz',
> and it turns out there's a killer bug that will only be fixed in the next 
> version... Its painful to contemplate halting development while we wait
> for the 'fixed' addressbook to become widespread (only to restart 
> development, and find killer-bug #2...)

My suggestion at this point... Use configure to determine whether the
user has the 'fixed' version and if not, disable the feature.  Unless
the feature is particular _core_ functionality I believe this is a
reasonable method to continue development but remain backwards
compatible with existing software.  That way you don't cut yourself
off from the majority of your potential users.

> This happens.  The JVM is 'mature', yet I've seen java code that is so weird
> that it exhibits a bug that isn't fixed until the latest and greatest
> release.

Well, why is the Java code so weird in the first place?  Sure, stuff
has bugs -- the authors are human and therefore fallible.  However,
can you work around the bugs?  Or perhaps the feature isn't
"important" enough to absolutely require it.  It's an enticement to
upgrade systems, in order to get some of the newer features, but it
doesn't prevent people from using the newer version of the code to get
other bug fixes and new features that aren't hindered by the external
software.

Yes, this is a more painful way to do things.  OTOH *I* want to see
Gnucash take off.  I want to see it in a position where I can tell my
parents that they should give up Windows (and Peachtree) and switch to
Linux and Gnucash.  But this requires a change in mentality for
releases, so you can KEEP your user base instead of ignoring them.  My
hope is that you can incrementally move forward and at the same time
maintain the backwards compatibility.

> --linas

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord@MIT.EDU                        PGP key available