On Wed, 10 Nov 1999, Marc Lehmann <pcg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Either we have a help system or we haven't. At the moment, we haven't. I'd > like to use it myself, but I don't want to install a useless gnome just > for that. As Sven mentioned, you could say exactly the same thing about Gimp-Perl. Both the help system and Gimp-Perl fail to compile on the Solaris 2.6 machine that I use for most of my GIMP work. If you do not want the help system to be part of the standard GIMP package, then I would definitely recommend to also move Gimp-Perl out of that package. By the way, you do not have to install the whole GNOME system, but only the gnome-libs package. These libraries do not take much disk space. Less than Perl, for example. ;-) [...] > > All we have to do is to solve the packaging/configure problems. > > Do you expect this to be solved before 1.2? That would be nice. > > > A help system that only works by chance (i.e. not on the majority of > > > platforms) is not work the hassle. > > > > s/help/perl/ > > However, perl works on many _many_ more platforms than the help system, > which only works on a very limited number of systems. I disagree. Perl _does_ work on many platforms, but you cannot say the same about Gimp-Perl. The latter only works on _very_few_ platforms, because it requires a recent version of Perl (the majority of machines that I have access to are using a Perl that is more than two years old), with some third-party modules such as PDL, Parse::RecDescent, Gtk-Perl. These modules do not compile cleanly on some systems: PDL worked for me under Linux, but not under Solaris where many self-tests failed. Also, the fact that Perl uses a different set of "configure" rules and "prefix" directories means that it is not easy or not possible for someone to compile a private copy of the GIMP (with Gimp-Perl enabled) on a multi-user system if that person does not have write access to the site-perl directories. I am even tempted to say that if you take a machine with a "default" Linux installation or any other UNIX-like OS, it is easier to get the help system running (by installing gnome-libs) than to get Gimp-Perl running (by upgrading Perl and installing the required modules). So please stop complaining about the help system, because that could backfire on Gimp-Perl quickly... -Raphael
