Release Wranglers Call - 5th March 2003

[Egbert Eich]

Kaleb S. KEITHLEY writes:
 > 
 > Either leave it as is, or update to the latest-and-greatest, if updating 
 > is low risk.
 > 
 > Breaking things that used to work is a Bad Thing. The X tree has 
 > historically been self contained, i.e. to build it you didn't have to go 
 > get other things first. If everyone agrees that this is no longer 
 > necessary, that's fine; but I'm not sure I'm hearing everyone say that 
 > it's okay.
 > 
 > We seem to be running pell mell to make a relesase. You say there's a 
 > desire for a quick release, but who exactly desires this? I only hear 
 > JimAndKeith saying this. Yes Senator McCarthy, I want to see that list 
 > in your briefcase.
 > 

A self contained tree has its merits, you can build it on about any
system that comes with little more than a compiler. On the other hand
we already had some kind of external dependencies. libpng is one example.

The disadvantage of the self contained system is that someone has to
go and update things and Imake-ify them. I just went thru this with
freetype2. It was not a great big deal - but this would have to be
done once per release. If we are going to have more frequent releases
we sure would have to find someone to do it for every release.

Asking people to pull such things from an external source may not
be too much to ask if we detect the missing pieces reliably and
early in the build and instruct the user where to get them.

For me - as one who relies on self contained builds - it would not
be too much trouble to import those pieces to my cvs. My hope is
that these pieces don't themselves require unreasonably many other
pieces themselves - which freetype doesn't.
I'd just have to learn how to install these pieces in a way that
they don't go beyond the directory I'm working in.
I whish autotools had a feature like Imake that it could (optionally)
create links instead of copying the files around. This would make 
in place testing much easier.

Egbert.