[Synfig-devl] Merge ETL into synfig core?

[Denis W. <de...@on...>]

Hello,

I am currently trying to revive the Debian package for synfig and get it 
back into the Debian/Ubuntu package archives. During this, occassion, I 
noticed that there is a separate "ETL" library which is described as being

   "[...] a multi-platform class and template library designed to add
   new datatypes and functions which combine well with the existing
   types and functions from the C++ Standard Template Library (STL)."

However, the library seems to contain a lot of graphics-related classes 
which probably better fit into the synfig core library. It also does not 
seem to be used anywhere else not used anywhere outside of synfig, so 
there doesn't seem to be a good reason for it to be separate. (ETL also 
contains quite a few classes for use cases which are perfectly addressed 
by the C++ standard library these days - for instance, for reference 
counting there is the excellent shared_ptr - but this is a whole other 
topic for itself.)

So how about merging ETL into synfig-core for the next release? This 
would greatly simplify packaging; trying to get a library used by only a 
single application into distributions is not easy (and for good 
reasons). Doing so should be trivial, given that ETL seems to consist of 
only of headers - it should be as easy as copying the files over and 
doing some minor tweaks. (With the proper guidance, I would be willing 
to do that work.)

The only real problem might be that existing branches with modifications 
to ETL might need some work to merge cleanly, but as git recognizes 
moved files by similarity, this shouldn't be much a problem (though that 
would have to be tested).

What do you think?

Regards,
Denis Washington