[Sugar-devel] depending on introspection

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 10:19 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>> I think Sascha is right that a jhbuild which supports a GNOME 3.0
>> based Sugar on old distributions would be unmaintainable. It will be a
>> lot of effort and it will break most of the time anyway. We need to
>> move in the opposite direction (i.e. getting rid of jhbuild completely
>> as soon as possible).
>>
>> But to me that means we need to move on and let distributions keep up.
>> If Debian doesn't support a modern stack developers will either deal
>> with the problem themself (by building stuff from source, custom
>> packages etc) or use a different distribution. We just can't do
>> anything about it and it should not be our focus anyway.
>
> I have no problem myself in this course of action, as I have switched
> distros before because of Sugar and would do it again. But I think
> some present contributions do have problems?

I don't want to sound harsh, but I just don't think we can do much
about that. We cannot support both stacks in Sugar because the
differences are two radical (or at least that's my impression). And
asking developers to stick to old distributions because the new ones
dropped support for the old stack is equally bad, probably worst.

I'm pretty confident people will be able to deal with it anyway.

>> Something to consider is a general API break while we are moving to
>> introspection and gtk 3.0, which might need a longer development
>> cycle, in parallel with bare maintenance of the stable stack. A
>> slightly longer transition period should help everyone and breaking
>> (err fixing) as much as we can at the same time will make sure we are
>> able to support the new API for a longer time.
>
> Hmm, do you have more details already?

If you mean about the kind of incompatible changes we might want to do
during this period, I don't yet :) I would like to see a nice, well
documented SDK for activity development and API cleanups `will be
certainly part of that, but I don't have concrete plans yet.

Marco