2008-12-06, 12:17
This is in response to http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/5416 since that ticket is becoming way too long and more of a religious discussion then a bug/feature ticket.
@candrews: I didn't mean to scare you off. There's no reason you can't learn and contribute.
@Xake: How is telling people they are on their own if they don't use specific versions any different than providing them with specific versions. And if Ubuntu upgrades their version, does that mean we no longer support the simple users who don't know how to install an older version? And how is it any better to force users to downgrade their libraries? Then they'll break other packages. The last thing we're going to do is give users a compile time option of using their system libraries or ours. Even if we say we don't support it, people will still come here asking for us to support it. If we're going to go that route we're going to go at it full force. And I do think it's a good thing to work toward, we just have to be careful how we do it.
Gimp may not have the full version of the source in their repo, but we're not Gimp so we're allowed to do it different. There is no harm in including the source in our repo. It especially helps with debugging. You don't know how many times I've had to go into Python to track down a crash. A feat which would not have been nearly as easy if we used the system library.
We're not even going to get into security. If you surf the Internet, you're done already. Perhaps we should take out all support for remote media since that has the highest probability of being malicious. Frankly I'd be more worried about buffer overruns in XBMC then in third party libraries.
I guarantee the changes we've made to Python cannot be pushed upstream. If you'd like to write the Python dev list and ask them to please not use certain functions, then by all means. But as I said to candrews, make sure you know what you're talking about before you go making these grand statements. The source is available, do a diff.
@candrews: I didn't mean to scare you off. There's no reason you can't learn and contribute.
@Xake: How is telling people they are on their own if they don't use specific versions any different than providing them with specific versions. And if Ubuntu upgrades their version, does that mean we no longer support the simple users who don't know how to install an older version? And how is it any better to force users to downgrade their libraries? Then they'll break other packages. The last thing we're going to do is give users a compile time option of using their system libraries or ours. Even if we say we don't support it, people will still come here asking for us to support it. If we're going to go that route we're going to go at it full force. And I do think it's a good thing to work toward, we just have to be careful how we do it.
Gimp may not have the full version of the source in their repo, but we're not Gimp so we're allowed to do it different. There is no harm in including the source in our repo. It especially helps with debugging. You don't know how many times I've had to go into Python to track down a crash. A feat which would not have been nearly as easy if we used the system library.
We're not even going to get into security. If you surf the Internet, you're done already. Perhaps we should take out all support for remote media since that has the highest probability of being malicious. Frankly I'd be more worried about buffer overruns in XBMC then in third party libraries.
I guarantee the changes we've made to Python cannot be pushed upstream. If you'd like to write the Python dev list and ask them to please not use certain functions, then by all means. But as I said to candrews, make sure you know what you're talking about before you go making these grand statements. The source is available, do a diff.
