"Joe Atzberger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 5:49 PM, MJ Ray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [ Ever-increasing dependencies ] > > Maybe not inherently wrong, but it is poor marketing, isn't it? > > Not at all. I never drive 100MPH or accelerate 0 to 60 in the shortest > possible time, but it is not "bad marketing" for Ford to have 100MPH on the > speedometer, and to publish their performance times. Nobody will be scared > off by dependencies that install themselves cleanly in the background > without their intervention.
There we disagree a bit. Ford takes a kicking in the UK if they try to make a feature out of their top speed. It's also rather difficult to define "install themselves cleanly" well: are our use cases still the same as they used to be? [...] > This sounds like agreement. I rewrote the LDAP handling for Koha and it's > dependencies are already optional. The feedback from earlier versions of > the installer that indicated that was pretty poor though. Something like: > You should run: perl -MCPAN -e 'install "If you want to authentify to LDAP, > install Net::LDAP on your system.";' Not to get into too much detail on an old, now-fixed bug: please everyone test releases on a naked system if possible! [...] > Then besides our method of accounting for optional deps, the other question > is how to categorize deps as friendly-enough-to-be-included or > problematic-enough-to-be-optional. We should have one or more of the > following: > > 1. Explicit criteria, so the developer knows which path to take. For > example, that PurePerl modules are OK. This helps the developer know > *before* the dep is added. > 2. Specific systems (OS's) that we are targeting, such that compatibility > on all of them would be sufficient. I want to acknowledge the tendency of > this topic to drift off into OS wars and advise that we be strictly > pragmatic. > 3. A vetting process for proposed deps, ideally including buildbots or > other automated checks. The automated steps help the developers catch > problems *after* the dep is added (to test code, at least). 4. No new required dependencies during the release engineering phase except to clear a blocker or critical bug. Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ (Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237 _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha.org http://lists.koha.org/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel
