[Development] Module maintainers: action required (Coin slowly migrates from sync.profile to .gitmodules)

[Jędrzej Nowacki]

Hi,

Short version:
  We plan to migrate from using sync.profile to qt5/.gitmodules in Coin, so 
please make sure that the files are in sync and that they contain sensible 
informations in every actively maintained branch.

Long version:
  Currently, for every integration Coin is reading module dependency from 
sync.profile which is stored in the root directory of every module. The file 
contains section that looks more or less like that:
  %dependencies = (
          "qtbase" => "",
          "qtxmlpatterns" => "",
  );
Which means that the module depends on qtbase and qtxmlpatterns. Now this 
approach happened to be not flexible enough, as it doesn't allow  to easily 
define an alternative dependency chain without changing content of the module 
or forcing rebuild of depending modules. We want to migrate to qt5/.gitmodules 
that looks like that:
  [submodule "qtdeclarative"]
          depends = qtbase
          recommends = qtsvg qtxmlpatterns
          path = qtdeclarative
          url = ../qtdeclarative.git
          branch = dev
          status = essential
As it leave outside of the module we can easily use a shadow definition that 
overwrites certain aspects of it. As a bonus changing .gitmodules would 
trigger partial qt5 check, verifying if all leaf modules are intact.
For integrations Coin will use union of "depends" and "recommends" fields.

Thank you!
  Jędrek

ps. I heard rumors that Oswald want deprecate sync.profile too :-)