Re: Updating glib2.0

[Ken Brown <kbrown@cornell.edu>]

On 5/28/2020 7:20 AM, Achim Gratz wrote:
>> 1. It's probably unrealistic to expect someone to adopt all the GNOME 
>> components.  If such a person existed, I think we would have heard from 
>> him/her by now.
> 
> Ideally that person would have some ties into the upstream development community 
> as well.  It might be worth asking there directly if anybody has any points of 
> contact already (I don't).

I'm pretty sure there's no one there (or at least no one who works on glib) who 
understands Cygwin.  For years, Yaakov has used a "Cygwin is not win32" patch in 
his Cygwin build of glib2.0.  About a year ago someone noticed this and patched 
the glib sources in an effort to capture the intent of Yaakov's patch.  (They 
didn't just apply his patch!)  They didn't get it quite right, but they made 
progress, and the corresponding patch needed today is much smaller than the old one.

My point here is that whoever made this change had good intentions but is not 
qualified to be a Cygwin maintainer, even if they wanted to be.  And no one else 
has touched that code.

>> 2. I'm willing to adopt various components on an as-needed basis.  For 
>> example, since I want to update gimp and it needs an updated glib2.0, I'm 
>> willing to adopt the latter and update it to its latest release. I've just 
>> started working on it and discovered that it needs an updated gtk-doc, so I'll 
>> plan on adopting that too.
> 
> I think the current way of adopting as needed and then immediately letting it 
> fall into orphaned status again is better than doing nothing, but eventually 
> we'll run into troublöe with that model.

If I were to adopt some of these packages, I would do it with the intention of 
keeping them up to date.  But I'll wait to hear from Yaakov.  If he thinks it's 
better to keep the GNOME components at their current state until someone is 
willing to adopt all of them, I'll go along with that.

Ken