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From: Josef W. <Jos...@gm...> - 2005-11-05 19:44:00
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On Saturday 05 November 2005 09:53, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote: > On Sat, Nov 05, 2005 at 01:03:33AM +0100, Josef Weidendorfer wrote: > > Why don't you make a separately distributed, external VG tool out of > > it? > > > because being integrated gives you more visibility, relieves you from > release management, more or less assures continuous code review from > people who ought to know what they are talking about and finally the > user has less effort to obtain + install it. That is all good and fine, but VGs history tells me: there was not one tool being accepted to be included into VG unless the author was one of the VG core authors itself. And there is a reason: if the author disappears, all the maintenance falls back to the core developers. And at such a point, it is better to drop it again. This even happened to one tool from a core developer: helgrind. And that was even "only" because of changed funtionality of VG core. > on the downside, you're bound to the core project's release schedule ... No. Unfortunately that is the case even with external tools: As the tool API's major number changes with every major VG release, I am "forced" to come up with a release of my external tool ASAP. There were 6 bug reports for debian because Callgrind did not catch up in time with VG 3 :-( > > It is a lot easier to be not the only one checking that a VG > > installation provides enough for such external tools. > > > ... and if the project is supposed to have library character, it gets > less testing in this area. > > really, it's all the same as with kde. ;) VG has a small active developer community, you can not compare it to KDE (and even KDE has unmaintained code in its core distribution!). In the KDE case, a big plus to be in a core package is to get i18n. This is not a problem with VG. So perhaps an idea for VG >= 3.2: Make a VG core distribution with pure library character, without any tool at all, and provide all tools externally. Visibility is done via valgrinds web site, listing all tools available. I am quite sure that Fedora/SuSE/Debian etc. would provide packages for all such tools. And by calling the package e.g. "valgrind-omega" it probably will be installed by users interested in valgrind. Josef |