"Joe Atzberger" <ohiocore@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 5:49 PM, MJ Ray <mjr@phonecoop.coop> 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