Trent W. Buck wrote: > I've actually tried to do this, and it rapidly becomes painful as soon > as you have more than one architecture, or more than one ABI, or even > wildly different versions of libc. I think keeping convenience copies > of binaries like liblua.la -- as opposed to a convenience copy of the > source (lua/*.[ch]) -- is a false economy and should be discouraged. > > I suppose there might be a case for it in the proprietary community if > you don't actually have access to the source of middleware libraries > that you're linking to. I don't have any experience in that community.
Not quite the "proprietary" world, but certainly in "managed language land" (ie, .NET/Mono, Java) there tend to be more use in convenience/source-controlled binaries (due in no small part to the cross-architecture nature of VM-targeted binaries). One school project of mine has a copy of C5.dll, which is distributed (and I believe GACced) in Mono, but not in Windows. To include the source would be to bulk a (currently) 4-source file project to something in the low 60s (I believe), and requiring it to already be GACced (akin to dll-registration or library path installation, but with strict platform-level side-by-side version control) is a bit much for a low level requirement in a school project meant to be built on a wide variety of systems. The big project for "work" (a very small startup) has 3 .dlls from an external dependency in the darcs repository. My company currently only has access to binaries for these libraries, and the repository is as good of a place to store them as any. Plus, these libraries are on a monthly update cycle with the occasional API breakage so having them under source control has already proved to be invaluable (like using darcs' cherry picking to temporarily roll back to a previous month's library upon the discovery of some unexpected regression). > So: I advocate binary extensions remaining boring by default, at least > until someone gives a strong real-world use case for changing that. Considering you can manually darcs add something that matches boring, I certainly agree that binaries should be boring by default. -- --Max Battcher-- http://worldmaker.net _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
