"SteveKing" <steveking@gmx.ch> writes:
> Since my suggestion about a new property for
> subversion "svn:tarballs" showed some interest
> (see http://subversion.tigris.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=40545)
> I implemented this function.
>
> That way all needed external libraries can be fetched
> by the subversion client and users don't need to
> visit several websites and spend their time searching
> for the correct library to download and extract.
I should have spoke sooner, before you started coding. I know that
someone else liked this idea, but I really don't like it. To me, it
epitomizes the worst kind of "feature creep" that software should
resist.
It sounds like a whole new feature designed to fix one specific
annoyance related to bootstrapping Subversion. First, I maintain that
most software distributions *don't* force you to grab and unpack
miscellaneous tarballs in order to compile. There's no general "itch"
to scratch here. Subversion is somewhat unique in that regard.
And second, I maintain that this isn't even a problem with Subversion:
people building svn for the very first time always download the
release-tarball, which *already has* neon, apr, and apr-util unpacked.
After a 'make install', the three auxilliary libraries are in the
system, which means a checkout of svn HEAD no longer requires any
tarballs. So even if we patched this feature into svn, svn wouldn't
be using it! There's no need.
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Received on Sat Jul 12 21:59:41 2003