GDA: Status

[Derek Atkins]

"Nathan Buchanan" <nbinont at gmail.com> writes:

>> The assumption here (in both #1 and #2) is that GDA-4 will be
>> released sooner than that gda-dev branch will finish.  I have seen
>> no such assurance.  What happens if gda-branch finishes, gets
>> merged back into trunk, but GDA-4 hasn't been released yet?
>
>
> We'd be in the same predicament as we would be in with GDA v3 - needing to
> distribute our own code to make things work. I'm not saying this is ideal,
> just that it isn't any worse.

I think it is worse...  (more on this later)

>> It means that *we* cannot release GnuCash 2.4 because a major
>> dependency (GDA) isn't available in the major distributions.
>
>
> This assumes we don't distribute any of it with our code. I believe we have
> done this sort of thing in the past, but it was before my time here.

Most recently it was done with GOffice.  However, GOffice didn't
add any new dependencies that we didn't already have (except for
GSF, which we ALSO included).  In other words, we didn't need to
significantly check for additional packages, nor did we need to
require any additional packages to build GnuCash.

This would NOT be the case with GDA.  If we included GDA then
we'd need to add a build dependency on SQLite, MySQL, and PG
in order to get GDA built properly.  If we could depend on GDA
then we wouldn't need those additional build dependencies.

>> Also, in the past 18-24 months we've seen GDA move from 1.3
>> to 2.99 to 3.0 to 3.9/4!  Are we really confident that in another
>> 9-12 months they wont scrap this and move to GDA-5 and leave us
>> in the dust yet again?
>
>
> A very valid point.

-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 at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available