[Sugar-devel] New Telepathy dependencies (was: Re: recent jhbuild breakage)

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 11:30, Sascha Silbe
<sascha-ml-reply-to-2010-2 at silbe.org> wrote:
> Excerpts from Simon Schampijer's message of Wed Aug 25 12:33:35 +0200 2010:
>
> [New Telepathy dependencies]
>> > Attached to http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2228 can be found a patch
>> > that adds these dependencies to jhbuild, any testing and commentaries
>> > will be appreciated.
>> Great, does work fine for me! To me it sounds great to include those
>> deps for the moment as they are not in major distros yet.
>
> Actually I was rather glad to be (almost) rid of Telepathy in
> sugar-jhbuild. What are the minimum versions
>
> a) Sugar 0.90 needs
> b) you would recommend using?

You can check it here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.90/Notes#Dependencies

I will be updating that page as we require newer minor versions
because of any bugs fixed during integration testing.

> Debian [1], Fedora 12+, Ubuntu Karmic+ [2] all contain
> telepathy-mission-control 5.3.1+. I'd rather drop Fedora 11 (already EOL)
> and Ubuntu Jaunty (EOL in about a month [3]) than build Telepathy from
> source.

We would need to backport a ton of bugfixes from mission-control 5.5.x
to 5.4.x along with refactorings, I'm afraid we'll do better by
sticking with the upcoming stable release.

Just to be clear, I see why you would have liked to stop building
telepathy (and any other sugar dependencies) in jhbuild but if the
Sugar community is going to be involved in the development of the
platform we use then we are going to invariably have to depend on
stable releases not yet released.

For the last years we have been in a situation in which we were able
to just use the platform as it was and workaround any issues inside
Sugar, but GNOME is now transitioning to a new API and this:

- forces us to adapt Sugar to the new API by dropping dependencies and
acquiring new ones (which may not have had a stable release yet),

- and also gives us an opportunity to influence it with our work so we
end up breaking some limitations and we can remove workarounds.

It's also relevant that our most important distro today is Fedora and
it is very willing to drop obsolete components and "encourage"
upstreams to move on.

As an illustration, Read won't work in F14 because the python bindings
were broken and we were told to use introspection instead, of which
there isn't an stable release yet. It should serve to us as a warning
of what will come in F15.

In summary: we need to do work on the platform if we want to remove
long-standing limitations and keep being shipped in distros, and this
will mean that we cannot solely rely on already packaged components.

Regards,

Tomeu

> Sascha
>
> [1] http://packages.debian.org/telepathy-mission-control-5
> [2] http://packages.ubuntu.com/telepathy-mission-control-5
> [3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases
> --
> http://sascha.silbe.org/
> http://www.infra-silbe.de/
>
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