On 13-01-13 19:44, Yawar Amin wrote:
Hi Geert,
On 2013-01-13, at 10:28, Geert Janssens <[email protected]> wrote:
Regarding your comment in 7.3: it is indeed not possible to use the
XDG_DATA_DIRS method to load a different set of documentation for the
system-installed gnucash. This is because the 2.4 series uses a different
mechanism to locate the documentation, which is hard-coded at compile time. So
XDG_DATA_DIRS only works with fairly recent trunk builds and for future
system-installed gnucash starting from GnuCash 2.6.
Ah, that makes sense. I'll update the wiki page with that. In general, are
improvements like this not often backported to 2.4? I'm not very familiar with
the GnuCash release management policies, sorry for asking n00b questions :-)
Thanks,
Yawar
Yawar,
Feel free to ask any question, n00b or advanced :)
Backporting follows these general criteria:
- only bugfixes are backported, not enhancements.
- and then only if the backport is fairly trivial. Complex fixes will
not be backported because the risk on new bugs in the fixes is too high.
Exceptions exist, but must be evaluated case by case if it makes sense
to backport.
For example during the 2.4.9 cycle it was decided to backport the
changes required to get the Windows build working with guile 1.8. This
was a difficult decision because it was a very complex code change. On
the other hand it only influenced the Windows build and the Windows
specific code was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain if we
continued depending with guile 1.6. So eventually it was agreed to
proceed anyway with this backport. It cost us the 2.4.9 release
(completely broken on Windows) to get it straight.
The change to allow documentation testing based on XDG_DATA_DIRS is not
a bugfix but an enhancement. So by the above criteria it's normally not
backported. It could be argued that only developers would notice (and
benefit from) this change so a backport could be considered.
However, this change is actually a side effect of a much larger effort
drop all libgnome dependencies (GnuCash is still a Gnome program, but
Gnome itself has abandoned libgnome). This effort touches many parts of
the code and are not suited for backporting. That's a second reason the
XDG_DATA_DIRS changes aren't backported.
Hopefully that clears it up a bit.
Geert
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