[avahi] Modular Avahi releases?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Thu, 06.04.06 00:24, Sjoerd Simons (sjoerd at luon.net) wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> The avahi source tarball contains bindings for several languages.
> Because of the way debian works, this cause various problems (or
> well, overhead) for us.  Especially the mono bindings seem to cause
> a lot of overhead (as mono itself still seems to be very much in
> flux)

Could you explain this further? How does the current tarball make
things complicated for you? It's probably not that hard to build the
mono bindings only on architectrues that support it?

> Would it be possible to split up avahi into several source release ?
> So one for avahi's core, one for the mono bindings, one for qt
> etc.. This would make our live as packages a lot easier. And for
> upstream it'll become a lot easier to do small releases for small
> fixes to a specific binding. Dbus is also going this route, which is
> something i'm really looking forward too.

Hmm. I don't really see why this should make thing easier for
us. Right in contrast, I would say it makes stuff harder for us, since
we'd need to manage each micro package independently. That's much more
maintainership work than we currently have. 

The qt bindinds just consist of 200 lines of code. Making a micro
package of this, seems to me like a lot of overhead. Especially when
it comes to autoconf, which will add a lot of extra space overhead for
each micro package.

Something similar is true for the Glib, Python and Mono stuff. Those
parts are really lightweight.

Besides that, splitting Avahi up would certainly hamper our work to
keep all bindings up-to-date. Simply because we wouldn't detect so
quickly if we broke one of the bindings.

Richt now I am not convinced at all that splitting up avahi would be
an improvement. But maybe you can convince me of the contrary?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering; lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
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