On 26 Dec, Garry R. Osgood wrote:
> The tarballs and patch-sets are really meant for end-users
> who prefer to compile from source, but don't otherwise
> desire to get involved in maintenance and so don't have
> a strong motivation to keep a bleeding-edge source tree
> around. Patch sets are published with this laid-back
> attitude in mind, They lack the CVS administrative files
> which is a pity (but then, CVS admin directories don't
> always transplant themselves effortlessly. They depend
> on the context of particular users on particular clients
> using particular CVS servers)
Patchsets also have a big problem which timecop already
noticed: They don't contain binary files or patches to
such and thus a patched tree might miss quite a few important
files after a while. xdelta wouldn't cause that particular
problem but is harder to use and deltas are not as obvious
to read as an unified diff.
I also noticed the first problem a while ago and thus I had
to refetch the whole tarball every now and then which is a
pain over a slow line.
Luckily our maintainer is kind enough to provide bzipped tarballs
while the GNOME maintainers in general haven't got the clue yet.
--
Servus,
Daniel
