[avahi] Modular Avahi releases?

[Sebastien Estienne]

On 4/7/06, Lennart Poettering <lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
> 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?

Another issue with splitting is that we may introduce bugs in our
build system, that is today quite stable and robust.

We would have to do again a lot of work to ensure that it builds
correctly on all the architecture/distribution that we support.

And the other distribution that already packaged it (mandriva, suse,
redhat, gentoo, arch, freebsd, etc) would have to start from scratch
on their packages

>
> Lennart
>
> --
> Lennart Poettering; lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
> ICQ# 11060553; GPG 0x1A015CC4; http://0pointer.net/lennart/
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--
Sebastien Estienne