Requested Moratorium on hard to build dependency bumps for KDE 5

[Ben Cooksley]

On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 5:12 PM, Martin Gräßlin <mgraesslin at kde.org> wrote:
>
> ----- Ursprüngliche Mitteilung -----
>> On 6/6/11, Thomas Lübking <thomas.luebking at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Am Mon, 6 Jun 2011 17:08:24 -0400
>> > schrieb Maksim Orlovich <mo85 at cornell.edu>:
>> >
>> > > Why would wayland support have any effect on runtime dependency on
>> > > X11?
>> >
>> > http://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/building-and-running-wayland
>> > Building mesa
>> >
>> > Wayland uses the mesa EGL stack, and all extensions required to run EGL
>> > on KMS are......
>>
>> Sorry, my wording was poor: OK, wayland needs recent Mesa at runtime,
>> but I am not running Wayland; so why would I need to upgrade my mesa?
> It's not different to the current situation (and that's what I wanted to point out):
> With 4.7 there is a runtime requirement to Mesa 7.10 if you want to use the *optional* feauture of OpenGL compositing.
>
> With 4.8 there will be a runtime requirement to Mesa 7.11 if you want to use the *optional* feature of KWin being a Wayland server.

I gather from this that X11 will be completely unaffected? Wanting to
depend on unreleased software is unprecedented for a component of
kde-workspace providing a commonly expected feature - and is something
I find objectionable. Especially if the dependency offers no benefits
to those of us whom recieve no benefit from the increase in
dependencies.

>
> It should not affect the runtime requirements for X11, but if Mesa 7.11 gets released before our 4.8 dependency freeze, we have to depend on it.

Can you please clarify what you mean by we *have* to depend on it?
Does this mean which of the following:
* CMake level check making KWin completely unavailable to people
without Mesa 7.11
* Runtime level check making all compositing unavailable to people
without Mesa 7.11 - regardless of whether it is X or Wayland
* Runtime level check only concerning Wayland

Either of options 1 and 2 are completely unacceptable under any
circumstances - considering that people who will be developing for 4.8
will be doing so under distributions which ship 4.7 - which will
probably only have Mesa 7.10.

Compositing alters the way the window system operates and can expose
bugs - and by imposing these dependencies you are inhibiting the
ability of other developers to triage and fix bugs or other defects.

>
> Cheers
> Martin
>

Regards,
Ben