[Okular-devel] merging the mart/okularActive branch into master

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday, September 30, 2012 18:44:25 Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> > (for many application won't be even
> > possible) having separate repos one for each mobile application becomes
> > pretty quickly a mess.
> 
> Why? we have separete repos for almost all our apps nowadays. And from what
> i can tell "Okular Active" as you call it is just a that, a new app using
> the okularcore library.

the desktop app is not done this way.

but yes, the touch UI can go into its own repository. it's obviously not a 
question of "can we". all choices are possible here (leave it in a branch and 
continuously merge master; break it out into its own repository; shove it into 
plasma-mobile repo; merge it into okular master).

so what are the pro's and con's? imho, keeping it in okular pro's are:

* keeps the okular usage in one place, which makes both hacking and packaging 
easier
* changes in okular APIs can be more easily be reflected in the touch app 
(synchronized development)
* encourages awareness of the QML support within the okular developers
* gets those working on the touch based app looking more into the rest of 
okular rather than simply treating it as a distant dependency
* with commits being in one place, there's a greater sense of vibrancy in 
okular development (one big fire instead of lots of little ones)
* it is the least amount of work to get the benefits desired (not handling 
multiple branches, keeping packaging and hacking simplified, etc)

con's:

* if the okular project is not interested in the touch app, or feels that 
plasma active is not a useful target, then it could be an unwelcome addition
* if the touch app becomes unmaintained, then its one more bit of rotting code 
in the okular repo (though this is easily handled by removing it)
* if someone wants to roll a Plasma Active based product release on a schedule 
that conflicts with okular release schedules, that could be an issue (branches 
essentially fix this issue; and really, it is preferable to always take the 
latest stable release rather than some random snapshot even if the touch app 
was in a separate repo)
* more code in one repository (not really sure that matters in this case, but 
trying to list all issues i can think of :)

those are the pro's/con's as i see them. please add / subtract as you see fit 
and then come up with a decision as the maintainer of okular. i really don't 
want this to become a discussion where each side asks questions of the other 
with increasingly clever debate ;) i just want an answer to "what should we do 
with that branch".

i've shared my ideas, and explained my thinking above, and simply need your 
decision as maintainer so i can do what ever is needed to make it happen.

cheers ...

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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