[PD-dev] Re: PD-cvs Digest, Vol 10, Issue 15

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Dec 16, 2005, at 12:44 PM, Thomas Grill wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>>>>
>>>> On Dec 15, 2005, at 11:46 AM, Tim Blechmann wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, 15 Dec 2005 12:00:37 +0100
>>>>> pd-cvs-request at iem.at wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Log Message:
>>>>>> checking in missing files on behalf of Miller (cleared it with him
>>>>>> first).  The files are from portmidi17nov04.zip
>>>>>
>>>>> great ... i'm trying to remove all external sources from the cvs  
>>>>> ...
>>>>> and the portmidi sources are added ...
>
> i think it's no secret that i'm also against keeping the sources  
> inside the pd cvs. I already proposed that more than once.
> To my mind it's a source for confusion and it's unnecessary  
> duplication of resources. The usage of the original PA-sources will  
> lead to faster propagation of improvements into PD and will finally  
> save us from the PA and PM folder chaos that has been present in the  
> CVS for too long already.

For released software, this makes a lot of sense.  Not so for alpha  
software like portaudio/midi.  The setup you describe works fine for  
developers, we all know how to make the compilation find the sources we  
want.

But the key points that you are overlooking is package building and  
auto-building.  For example, the Debian auto-builders are not going to  
add some tarball because we want them to.  There are no packages for  
portaudio 19 from RedHat, Debian, or Fink (let alone MinGW or MSVC).   
When looking at this, keeping these sources out of our CVS quite simply  
creates a lot of manual labor that is boring and annoying at best.

Importing external sources is a common practice, and the CVS manual  
even covers the topic.  CVS allows us to manage source code, no matter  
who wrote it.  I really dread the thought of handling this manually,  
which is what you are proposing.

.hc

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