Re: Countering the usual diatribe against binary files, was cvs diff, proposal for change

[Tom Copeland]

On Tue, 2003-09-09 at 13:06, Kaz Kylheku wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Sep 2003, Tom Copeland wrote:
> > Right... although in the case of 3rd party libraries, the line gets a
> > bit blurry.  If my project depends on, say, BCEL, I think it's
> > reasonable for me to check the BCEL jar file into my module/lib
> > directory.
> 
> Not necesarily. Your project also depends on some operating systems and
> libraries. You don't check in glibc2, the Linux kernel, or every
> Windows DLL that your program uses. Your makefile needs GNU make 3.79
> or later, so better check that in too!

I think one difference here might be that it's difficult (impossible?)
to have 2 versions of glibc on a machine, but it's quite simple to have
5 or 6 version of the BCEL jar file on a machine.

Would you agree that it might be unreasonable to expect someone who
wants to compile, say, Jakarta Tomcat, to have to download the source
for and compile the dozen or so jars on which Tomcat depends?

> Sometimes it's okay for binary components and tools to come from
> outside of the version control system, subject to some constraints like
> ``requires glibc 2.1.3 or later, and Linux kernel 2.4.43 or later''.

I think we're slowly converging towards agreement...

Yours,

tom