Andreas Hartmetz schrieb: > On Friday 12 February 2010 11:03:59 Frank Schaefer wrote: > >>>> libv4l compiles at least on the last 8 kernel-versions (and likely on >>>> olders, too). >>>> Tells us, how far should we go with backwards-compatibility ? ;) >>>> > I think it is a bad decision to refuse to compile on anything without strong > reasons. There are strong reasons, please read my prevoius mails again. If you were more familiar with the webcam-situation on Linux, you would understand better.
> Users shooting themselves in the foot because they can't use CMake, > or bad packagers, are not strong reasons. > And by making it mandatory now, we avoid users shooting themselves in the foot. :) [...] >>> See it from my perspective: Some software I use all the time suddenly >>> refuses to compile because I don't have something that I don't need >>> anyway, and the software decides that it's not worth compiling without >>> that, uhm, essential feature. Kopete actually is somewhat important for >>> me, video support I never use. >>> >> You can make it suddenly work again by installing libv4l ;) . >> >> Please note: there is currently NO possibility to compile Kopete WITHOUT >> the webcam-part. >> > Well, it does compile without v4l at least :) > But there is no switch for that, it simply depends on the platform. And the v4l-ioctls-calls are only tiny fragments of the video-code... >> Maybe we could change this in the future, but it's a bigger task with a >> low prority at the moment. >> If you think it's worth the work and you can spend some time on it, your >> work will be appreciated. >> I personally prefer spending my limited time on improving the >> webcam-code to make it more usable for people and the protocols. >> > You're the maintainers, I can't override your decision. But I think it's a > bad > decision: Kopete refuses to provide 90% functionality, you can have 100% or > nothing. The general approach in KDE is usually to compile with the absolute > minimum of dependencies and make the rest optional. That's developer-friendly. > Also consider that not every (Linux) system that can run KDE is a desktop. > Do you still think it's a good decision to not compile without v4l on a > platform that runs Linux and that can never have a webcam? > (Well, I see how it can be a nice hack to connect a webcam to an N900...) > See it from the developers/maintainers perspective: Video-conferencing is one of our main features, which is used by an constantly increasing number of people. It currently has several problems which can only be solved by using libv4l (or duplicating most of its code). Introducing an additional build-dependency is of course something we want to avoid, but the benefits simply outbalance this drawback. Please note: we are talking about _linking_ to an established library. The alternative would be to compile the whole library in. Don't understand me wrong: I have nothing against a switch allowing compilation without the video part. But it's simply not there at the moment and it's not that easy to implement. Cheers, Frank _______________________________________________ kopete-devel mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kopete-devel
