I think we should integrate them *more*. Get more developers building
and running the tests. Right now, they're a second class citizen, and
I believe that's a problem.
Cheers,
-g
On Feb 3, 2009, at 11:59, "Hyrum K. Wright" <hyrum_wright_at_mail.utexas.edu
> wrote:
> This issue has come up a few times on IRC, but I don't know if we've
> ever
> discussed it here, so I'm opening this can of worms now: Should the
> bindings be
> spun off into their own project(s)?
>
> Having the bindings in our tree has its benefits. In the early days
> of the
> project, having a large binding surface encouraged the use of
> Subversion as a
> library, and led to increased adoption. By making the swig bindings
> officially
> supported, users know they can expect a certain quality when they
> ship with our
> releases. Also, the bindings tests (especially the ruby bindings)
> provide
> additional test coverage into our APIs, which helps uncover
> additional bugs.
>
> However, in the last couple of years, it has seemed that shipping
> the bindings
> with the core libraries has been more of a hindrance than a help. I
> seem to
> recall more than one occasion where a release was held up because
> the bindings
> had problems, and a lack of knowledgeable maintainers[1] led to
> delays. In
> addition to catching bugs, the bindings tests also lead to spurious
> errors which
> can likewise delay development. The root cause seems to be a lack of
> maintainers, due to Real Life, lack of interest or otherwise. And
> shipping
> unmaintained code is a Bad Thing: it's better to not ship code than
> code that is
> full of bit rot.
>
> There are already other projects which maintain bindings for
> languages we do and
> don't include, such as SharpSvn, SVNCPP, PySVN and others[2].
> Should we follow
> their lead and graduate our existing swig and JavaHL bindings into
> separate
> projects? If we did, here are a few questions:
> * Where would we spin off the bindings to?
> * How much work would be involved in doing this?
> * Should/can it be done for 1.6?
>
> -Hyrum
>
> [1] No offense the the existing bindings maintainers, of course.
> The developer
> audience for the bindings is simply smaller than that of the core
> libraries.
> [2] http://subversion.tigris.org/links.html#bindings
>
> ------------------------------------------------------
> http://subversion.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=462&dsMessageId=1098250
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Received on 2009-02-04 02:41:48 CET