Bundling G-Wrap

[Linas Vepstas]

On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 04:22:59PM +0200, Andreas Rottmann was heard to remark:
> 
> [ CC'ing g-wrap-dev, guile-gtk-general. The discussion is about that
>   since G-Wrap now comes without GLib bindings, the GnuCash folks have a
>   dependency more, which they seem utterly opposed to ]

No, don't misunderstand/misquote on purpose.  You know what this is about.

> > My take on this? g-wrap should probably be a standard part of guile,
> > or swig, or something, and not a stand-alone package.

The complaint was about the proliferation of package dependencies
and the linux version of the old microsoft 'dll hell'.  Any given
day of the week, the mailing lists are dominated by discussion of
people who cannot successfully build/install gnucash.  That is just
plain wrong.  People should be talking about something else, and not
the difficulty of install.

The problem is the proliferation of packages that are poorly maintained
and don't have properly defined pkg-config or automake macros or
whatever, or are growing oldy/moldy/rancid due to lack of maintainer
activity.

I beleive that the problem could be solved by merging smaller packages
into bigger ones, where maintainers could share the work of upkeep.

> - bundling it with Guile: would mean _way_ too slow releases

Which is HIGHLY PREFERABLE to NO RELEASES which is what g-wrap has had
for 3-4 years now.  G-Wrap is broken, busted and no one is maintaining
it, and it basically just sucks because of this, and it is the 
leading #1 poster child for everything that can possibly go wrong
with an independent package release.  

I'd like to avoid re-living all of the mistakes of the past; the 
problem of packaging being the biggest.

(Surely you don't want to hear how 1.3.4 is incompatible with 1.3.1?
or that the package is (was?) identified as "g-warp" on debian ... 
a clever naming twist that makes it impossible to find, or the guile
warnings that it currently spews?)


--linas


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