Applications that need unreleased libraries

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Sun, 2005-10-23 at 09:25 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-10-23 at 00:15 -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > A new gnotime[1]_ has been released that unfortunately depends on a
> > version of the qof library which has been marked by the maintainers as a
> > development release, not intended for packaging.[2]_
> > 
> > The gnotime tarball includes a version of qof that it works with.  My
> > plan is to build the new gnotime against a static version of this
> > internal library until a new qof is released.  To track the static
> > dependency I'll also document the changes required to revert to the
> > system qof when the new version is released and file a bugzilla against
> > gnotime to remove the static qof.
> > 
> > Does anyone have a better suggestion?
> Not upgrading gnotime in FE.
> 
> IMO, FE should restrict itself to "sufficiently stable" packages.
> Developers marking their own work as "not intended for packaging" does
> not qualify as such, and therefore automatically excludes all work
> depending on this as "not upgradable/will have to wait until upstream
> has made it"
> 
I very much disagree that FE should restrict itself to only stable
packages.  

However, when a package has both stable and unstable versions I can see
staying with the stable version instead of the unstable version.  This
package is hard to quantify in this regard as the upstream author (who
is also a maintainer of the qof library) has made the decision that the
interfaces he needs from qof are ready to go into a stable release of
gnotime.

I've been test running the new version for over a month with no problems
so the application as a whole could fit the "sufficiently stable"
definition.  I could hold off on upgrading for another month or two and
watch for bugs upstream but if nothing shows up and qof doesn't make a
new general consumption release the only way to tell in the end is to
release it into the wild.

-Toshio
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