Etienne Gagnon wrote:
Hi, I've noticed that the build system tends to download external files. While I see some merit to this, I think that it is not a good approach in general, as it creates a very fragile build system in the long term. Imagine that some bug is discovered in Harmony 25.4. Regressions are applied against it and historical versions. Versions 24.x, 23.x, 22.x all exhibit the same bug. Then, ooops!, version 21.7 does not build as some library dependency can't be satisfied, the remote host has died/changed URL/etc.
Then you patch the build for that specific case. We're not going to support every version ever released for perpetuity.
I can understand that we might not want to store dependency libraries in the repository (yet, I am not that sure I really understand...). What prevents us from storing them on the web site? (I guess the web site is already all in the repository anyway, so storing them in one branch or another doesn't make much difference other than the difficulty to checkout the system, then building w/o a network connection...)
We don't want to be in the position of redistributing other people's work except as part of a distribution that uses it.
We have generally considered putting in SVN as a compromise, because it's clear it's part of of project, and not appearing to be an "available to everyone redistribution"
Unless we don't consider building historical versions as being important, or that a network connection is a hard dependency for building the system (a source CD wouldn't be sufficient to build)?
I don't consider being able to do an online build of any historical version that important. Because our releases will be archived, any dependencies included in the build will be archived on the mirror system, so any build should be reproducable.
geir
Etienne PS: I know, I know... I've got a few other messages to reply to... Just give me some time. :-)
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