Requested Moratorium on hard to build dependency bumps for KDE 5

[Sebastian Trüg]

On 06/06/2011 10:51 PM, Ben Cooksley wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 8:42 AM, Martin Gräßlin <mgraesslin at kde.org> wrote:
>> On Tuesday 07 June 2011 08:29:51 Ben Cooksley wrote:
>>> Next KWin. It currently depends upon Mesa 7.10. I have a local revert
>>> in a private local branch which reverts the dependency check code
>>> within KWin to continue to allow me to use compositing. Even though I
>>> have Mesa 7.8, I rarely experience KWin crashes - it has only crashed
>>> once in the past 2 months. I use an Intel Ironlake based graphics.
>>> This patch of mine works perfectly and does not cause any issues.
>> KWin does *not* depend on Mesa 7.10! KWin does not have any build dependencies on Mesa.
>> There is an optional build dependency on OpenGL and XComposite/XDamage. This all is optional!
>> If you use Mesa drivers there is a runtime requirement for at least Mesa 7.10, whose reasons
>> have been explained to you on plasma-devel.
>>
>> Given what you demand this is out of scope as it is not a build dependency. It is just that you
>> don't get the latest features when not having the correct runtime dependency. I might add that
>> using different drivers (NVIDIA or ATI blob as well as GLES/EGL Mesa drivers) do not have this
>> runtime requirement. It is also still possible to use KWin with XRender or without compositing at
>> all. Btw. patches to have an environment variable to overwrite all checks are welcome.
>>
>> Please also note that I will add a runtime requirement to Mesa 7.11 as I have here on my system
>> the start of the Wayland port which will be in 4.8 and requires Mesa 7.11.
> 
> Now that is absolutely overboard. OpenSUSE 11.4 isn't even 3 months
> old. And has Mesa 7.10. You are effectively classifying a distribution
> as unsuitable for trunk development. You are now depending on
> components which aren't even in released distributions!
> 
> (Note that having to live with a desktop without compositing isn't
> exactly what I would call usable for the long run)

IMHO it is out of the question to ask a developer to not implement a
great new feature just because the dependancies are too young.
In that case you should just stick with an older version of KDE itself.

Whom who wants the bleeding edge of KDE might also need the bleeding
edge of all the rest (in the worst case). Restricting ourselves will
lead to branching and a lot of wasted time on ifdefs and cmake checks.
This wasted time could otherwise be used to create great new features
and fix bugs.

Isn't this the way open-source software is supposed to work?
Collaborate, depend on the work of others?

Restricting ourselves to old versions (and as a developer anything
released is old for me) means to restrict the power we have and
undermines our very development model.

Cheers,
Sebastian

>>
>> Cheers
>> Martin
> 
> Regards,
> Ben
>