Re: Help wanted: simple tasks

On Thu, 22 Feb 2007, Andreas Niederl wrote:
> Tiger!P wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 10:37:30PM +0100, Andreas Niederl wrote:
>>> Håkan Kvist wrote:
>>
>> [...]
>>
>>>> library: libmsn
>>>> version in centerim:
>>>> current version: 3.2
>>>> current status: activly beeing developed
>>>> homepage: http://libmsn.bdash.net.nz/
>>>> The files AUTHORS, COPYING, Changelog, INSTALL, NEWS, README are all
>>>> empty =>
>>>> this is bad since all files should be imported to the centerim
>>>> repository imho
>>> It could also be done the other way around, externalizing actively
>>> maintained libraries and requiring them (or specific versions of them).
>>
>> When you require external libraries, it will be harder to track down
>> problems. And when the occure in the external libraries, you can't fix
>> them as easily as when you supply those libs with the own sources.
>
> Well, it shouldn't be that much of a problem. You could only support
> certain versions of the used libraries, so the users have to check their
> problems also with those before leaving the debugging work to the
> developers.
> Fixing libraries with an active and cooperative upstream may be more
> efficient than trying to solve things alone IMHO.
> Of course, if a lib is unmaintained or has a very lazy maintainer,
> inclusion is still an option.

Any libraries, in CenterICQ's case, should be included in the source.

These libraries are not like, say, libc, or imlib, or libraries which are 
shared across a system; they're development-only libraries which are going 
to be wrapped in CICQ to present a unified code and interface front-end to 
the user.  Users shouldn't be responsible for having to track down the 
difference in arcane internal versions of 0.9.3b and 0.9.4q of chatlib-dev 
in order to compile CICQ, nor as maintainers would you want the headache 
of trying to figure out every difference between what CVS is built against 
and what Joe User who just installed RedHat7 on his old PC is running.

Users probably aren't going to be using these libraries on their system 
for anything _except_ building CICQ - so give them the library we want 
them to use.  If they want to write their own Jabber client, let them go 
grab libjabber-dev from apt.

If they're dead libraries, they're dead.  If they work, it doesn't much 
matter.  The problem will be when, 6 months from the next release, 
libgadugadu stops working against the latest releases of the Gadu servers 
in the wild, and no one is working on the library any more to fix it.  If 
we can fix it, hooray, if not, then we need to be able to drop in a new 
library to make CICQ work again.  In which case, we're back to "include 
the libraries we want users to use" again.

_______________________________________________
Cicq mailing list
Cicq-xGejAJT2w6wWP6gT/[email protected]
http://mailman.linuxpl.org/mailman/listinfo/cicq
Questions? Check the FAQ first: http://centericq.de/faq/