[Pkg-mono-devel] Farewell monolithic kdebindings: Mono, Ruby, Smoke KDE bindings up in the air
Modestas Vainius
modax at debian.org
Mon Jun 6 20:43:55 UTC 2011
Hello,
when KDE SC 4.6.3 migrates to testing, I plan to switch away from monolithic
kdebindings to the split source packages. It is no secret that kdebindings has
always been a huge pain for many people (esp. qt/kde team and release team).
It links many languages complicating and tying various transitions together.
In the past, it stretched KDE transition to ~2 months. Not to mention
complexity in packaging multiple programming languages with many different
packaging practises. It's pretty clear that the kdebindings source package (in
its current form) has to go away for the benefit and sanity of everybody
involved.
Fortunately, there has been some positive movement towards split source
packages upstream. While split kdebindings won't officially arrive until 4.7,
I think it should be quite feasable to build 4.7 Beta tarballs (or previous
git snapshots) against our 4.6.x. I had quite much success with PyKDE4 [1].
Packaging was much simplified in the process. It should no longer kill
kittens.
That being said, I personally have no (even remote) intention to maintain
other bindings except Python (that is python-kde4 + krosspython). To be
honest, the only reason I care is a huge number of rdepends inside and outside
KDE SC and popularity (importance) of Python bindings in general.
So that leaves Mono, Smoke and Ruby bindings up in the air. They need
_dedicated_ maintainers with upload power (DD or DM) who would package
standalone version, _fix bugs_ even when they're nasty (be prepared) and keep
bindings updated in case new KDE SC release / language related transition
broke them. Packages can be maintained within or outside Qt/KDE team as
maintainer(s) prefer.
Otherwise, I will seek those bindings to be removed from the archive once I
upload standalone PyKDE4 bindings:
* Mono bindings have no reverse dependencies. No problem here.
* Ruby bindings have a single reverse dependency - omaque [2] (maintainer
CC'ed). In my opinion, this leaf package could be removed from testing/archive
until somebody steps up to maintain Ruby bindings. omaque popcon is very low.
* Smoke bindings have a single reverse dependency - qt4-perl [3]. This one is
a bit more complicated as debconf build-depends on the latter. Fortunately,
that build dependency seems to be redundant as debconf builds fine without it
[4]. Btw, I'm fully aware that removal of qt4-perl would kill Qt 4 Debconf
frontend. People, who don't want that, just have to repackage and commit to
maintaining Smoke bindings.
I'm not sure about the timeline yet (but definitely after KDE SC 4.6.3
migrates to testing). I think Python stuff could really be uploaded soon as
it's mostly ready. However, uploads could be delayed if Mono, Ruby or Smoke
needed more time to be prepared.
No new unstable uploads of monolithic kdebindings is planned.
[1] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-kde/kde-sc/pykde4.git;a=summary
[2] http://packages.qa.debian.org/o/omaque.html
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/q/qt4-perl.html
[4] http://bugs.debian.org/629405
--
Modestas Vainius <modax at debian.org>
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