Managing dependencies

[Reuben Thomas]

On 16 January 2015 at 22:57, Jerome Leclanche <adys.wh at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Your email is very confusing;  did you forget to send a part of it?
>

​No. Apologies for the confusion. What was confusing?​


> Users won't care about any difference, and honestly no matter which
> language they're written in they are unlikely to receive any more
> contributions than they currently do, so you won't convince any
> current maintainer of anything like that.
>

​That's exactly the point.: users won't care, and we'll get more mileage
out of limited developer time.


> Don't get me wrong, they are *nasty* right now. But this is fairly
> pointless. And why Perl of all things?
>

​It's the least worst option I can see, given the requirements of the
Portland Project.​ I said in my original message why I thought Python less
good. But I don't think it's worth quibbling over: either is much better
than shell.


> But they are useless and you won't convince anyone to adopt them over what
> is known to work,
>

​They don't work well. They frustrate users (who mostly register general
brokenness rather than xdg-util-specific problems) and developers (both of
applications, who get bug reports when functionality stops working in
desktop environments they've never heard of, and of desktop environments,
who are unable to fix said functionality in a timely manner). They are
routinely patched by distributions, and even those with many users and
active maintainers (e.g. Debian/Ubuntu) have outstanding bugs and
brokenness in one or more desktop environments. Their functionality is
frequently replicated by both apps and desktop environments.

In other words, they're currently failing. Since it is not that hard to fix
them, nor to make them easier to fix for desktop environment maintainers
and packagers, I'm happy to invest some time in this, though I'm not
proposing a full-on rewrite, at least, not all at once.

Part of the effort I would recoup as I currently need to maintain patched
versions of some xdg-utils scripts both for my own use and for use in other
programs I maintain; this is purely owing to bugs and missing functionality.

-- 
http://rrt.sc3d.org
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