Hi, Dave Neary <dneary@xxxxxxx> writes: > By "in an organised way", I mean simply that we make a decent effort > before changing build requirements to let people know that they're > going to be changed, when, why, and what they need to do to keep a > working GIMP CVS build environment. This is not the trivial problem > you're making it out to be. Sure, we can send mail to the list and I am pretty sure we did this in the past also. Perhaps we forgot in or two occasions (probably when we started to depend on automake-1.6 two years after it had been released). But we should not stall the GIMP development by introducing a policy that forces us to wait before we can do such a change. In the past all dependency changes have been necessary. There has always been the urgent need to do it in order to fix a severe problem. Do you really want us to introduce a week or two delay thus halting development until a dependency change can be made? What benefit would that give? > > No-one said we want to do that. What are you talking about? We > > talk about depending on GTK+-2.4 which will be the latest stable > > release of the GIMP toolkit at the time we start to use it. You > > don't want us to ignore the features it offers and use an > > unmaintained version instead, do you? > > No-one who is not a GNOME developer will have GTK+ 2.4.0 installed on > their machine. The first time people will have this software installed > is the early-adopters of GNOME 2.6.0 in April and May. GTK+ is the GIMP toolkit. I think it is completely reasonable to expect GIMP developers to have the latest stable released version of the GIMP toolkit installed. Actually I even expect GIMP developers to play with the GTK+ prereleases since that's the only way we can make sure that the GIMP toolkit works the way we need it to work. Right now for example it is important to check the 2.4 API because very soon there will be no chance to have things changed if they turn out to break The GIMP or don't suit our needs. If we would follow your suggestions we'd let the GNOME developers dictate how GTK+ evolves and I think that we should also play an important role here. I seriously believe that it is very important both for GTK+ and for The GIMP to follow GTK+ development closely and to adopt to their changes as early as possible. > At the heart of this issue is whether we want to make it easy for > people to build the GIMP. I think we do. Yes we do, but I think an easy build shouldn't be first priority. That's something that should be kept in mind and it's nice if we can make it happen. But often we will simply have to make people update their software. Sven
