On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 10:56 AM, Peter Samuelson <peter_at_p12n.org> wrote:
>
> [trimming Cc, clearly you're all reading dev]
> [David Glasser]
> > I was always under the impression that the deps tarball was a way of
> > not scaring off people from installing Subversion back when it was a
> > brand new system nobody had ever heard of with a surprising number of
> > dependencies. Now that Subversion is dominant enough that no
> > self-respecting system makes it hard to get svn up and running (and
> > even major consumer operating systems ship with svn by default), the
> > deps tarball seems like a nice gesture, but hardly a source of
> > compatibility worries.
>
> I don't know if users would read your statements about libsvn binary
> compatibility until 2.0 and assume that it doesn't apply if you use the
> deps tarball. (The INSTALL file pretty much says otherwise.) Myself,
> I would have assumed that the deps tarball, which is signed and md5'd
> and everything, was an implicit part of the distribution and the QA
> process (including compatibility testing).
>
> Maybe the solution here is to make it clear that using the deps tarball
> voids your binary compatibility warranty, that warranty only being
> honored if you stick to the same external libraries for each new
> Subversion build. (In practice, I believe this only actually matters
> for apr (and apr-util and serf, which use apr). The other external
> ABIs are shielded from consumers of your API.)
This is quickly becoming pointless but I guess I cannot help myself.
So if Red Hat 6 ships with Apache 2.2 and builds Subversion
accordingly should we be hiring lawyers to block their release because
they are breaking our compatibility warranty? How far should we go
with this?
I thought the dependencies file was a convenience for people to grab
the dependencies. 99.9% of whom could give a shit about ABI. Aren't
we better off giving these people the best set of dependencies and let
the people that rightfully need to care about ABI pick the right set
of dependencies? I am not even clear why if you were using SVN 1.4 and
moved to 1.5 you would even build new versions of the dependencies.
--
Thanks
Mark Phippard
http://markphip.blogspot.com/
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Received on 2008-04-08 17:05:27 CEST