Splitting the repos...

James Geboski jgeboski at gmail.com
Thu Apr 7 12:45:08 EDT 2016


Some *trivial* benefits:

 - Many other clients depend on libpurple, where distributions may not
separate libpurple from pidgin (or even finch). As a result, more
dependencies are imposed on the usage of libpurple. Having things
split out will provide more clearly defined boundaries for
distribution packaging. This is something that has been seen on the
BitlBee front with the majority of the users being minimalists.

- For the small portion of us that use source based distributions, it
is easier to only rebuild packages that are actually changed. With
things the way they are currently, libpurple might be updated, while
Pidgin and Finch are unchanged. With everything being in a single
package, Pidgin and Finch must also be rebuild, even when it is not
needed. I guess this can also expand to binary distributions as well,
but certainly is not as big of a deal.

- Smaller repositories. Cloning the Pidgin mercurial repository takes
forever. Having things split out would make it faster for developers
(and I guess users to an extent) to clone what they actually need. I
ran into this issue with the purple-facebook project, which clones the
mercurial sources, and applies a patch set to the sources.

- It might also be easier to track and manage changes to the
respective code bases. Especially with keeping things organized with
the pull request model.

James



More information about the Devel mailing list