On Mon, Mar 13, 2000 at 05:01:56PM +0100, Raphael Quinet <quinet@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Before all of you second his suggestions I would really appreciate it if
> > people looked at the current situation. (I mean: think first!)
>
> Marc, it is unfortunate that you are replying in a defensive mode as
No, I am not in defensive mode. I am in educating mode. I might be personally
scared that people post things and try to make decisions based on a wrong
understanding of the situation. Especially some people who could know better.
I didnt feel personally attacked by your post...
> is because a similar proposal that I sent several months ago was
> rejected because you said that all my claims were FUD. At that time,
> some of my assumptions were wrong and some other were right but my
> suggestions were ignored as a whole.
Indeed, that can happen easily :(
> So the current situation is: if you do not install the required Perl
> modules (especially Gtk.pm), most of the scripts do not produce any
> useful results.
This is a bug that was easily fixed once I was told about it. If you had
filed a bug report on the gnome bugtracker, you would have been more than
right to complain (I cannot read it as often as I wished), but as it seems
you kept quiet until lately.
> Besides, even if they would work, the pop-up messages warning the user
> about the missing module are not very friendly and lead the user into
> thinking that the Gimp is half-broken because the menus are cluttered
> with entries that generate warnings.
But neverteheless work (modulo scripts that di not supply defaults, but
these were script errors). My reasoning was that the scripts do provide
the basic effect, with at most the same number of user interactions (O.K.)
as if Gtk were installed.
I disabled this as people seemed to object (well, I only asked a few
people, but they were enough ;).
> > Disabling all perl-plug-ins because somebody didn't want to check the
> > facts is, for me, a very big decision that should not be made lightly.
> I agree, but this is _not_ what happened.
This is exactly what happened. You might not have intended it, but that
doesn't mean anything to me -> I was not angry at you anyway, so what
counts is the result.
> > No script will show up in the menu if it depends on something not installed.
> > For PDL, the scripts won't be installed in the first place.
>
> This is only partially true. Most of the scripts depend on Gtk.
This is wrong, IMHO :)
> are supposed to be able to run without it by using only the default
> values, but this does not really work: all of them generate warnings,
> most of them crash, and their usability is limited.
This were/are bugs, most of which were fixed by a single fix inside
gimp-perl. IF you had reported them earlier, it would have been fixed
earlier.
> I sincerely hope that you will not consider this message as a personal
> attack.
I didnt, don't and probably won't consider any of your messages as
personal attack. I feel that your first message was deeply wrong, however,
and went out to try to correct that.
> > 1. If PDL is missing, no scripts depending on it will be installed.
> > I don't see why all the majority of scripts not using PDL should also
> > be disabled.
>
> OK, then you could just skip the installation of those scripts, and
This is _exatcly_ what is happening since many months. Why is it so difficult
for me to communicate this to you?
> That was my main argument. If Gtk is missing, the user will get many
> warnings (one pop-up every time they try to use a Perl script) which
> gives the impression that the Gimp is broken.
Ok, so let's disable them for PR purposes. Fine with me...
> After the warning, most of the scripts crash anyway.
Ever occured to you that this was not a deliberate thing I did, but simply
some kind of, well, lets call it a "bug"?
> You could of course try to fix these crashes, because some of them
> look like real bugs in the scripts, but my message was not intended as
> a bug report..
I saw that, and I think this was very unfortunate :(
> > I don't think that any other part of gimp got attacked in these ways so
> > often than gimp-perl. I already have the feeling that gimp-perl bashing is
> > some kind of sports.
>
> Please, stop taking this personally!
Me != gimp-perl. It might be hard for you to understand that, but
gimp-perl is not part of my very heart. I happen to argue for some things
I have never touched myself, when I feel that they are attacked. In the
past, I have defened other parts of the gimp (which were not "mine")
similarly.
> Maybe gimp-perl has been discussed so often because of the way you reply
> to some messages
However, I am deeply determined that I did not start this kind of
action-reaction pattern. What makes it so bad is that I won't let FUD
spread, regardless of what people might think of me.
> that there are some problems. Whether these problems are technical,
> philosophical or purely imaginary does not matter: the discussions
I would guess reporting bugs in any way (I'd prefer mail on
gimp-developers or personal, to not clutter the list, but I understand the
need to scan the gnome bugtracker very well!) would help the situation
much more than asking for removing of plug-ins from the installation. Just
let the maintainer decide wether he can fix it, or wether the script
should be disabled, and bring the topic up when the maintaier (for
whatever reasons) does not do it. For example, when I was away and a
release needs to be made, disabling most or all of gimp-perl would be very
viable :)
> To start with, it would be nice if you would not say something like the
> following...
>
> > I do not mind if some people (like Raphael) make suggestions based on
> > a wrong understanding of the situation. I am, however, astonished that
> > even people like Sven, who _does_ _know_ _better_ takes it so lightly:
>
> ... when this is clearly not true. I believe that I understand the
> situation very well and I thought that my previous message contained
> enough explanations to make this clear.
However, I still don't believe you... ;) I didn't meant to insult you in
any way, I just wrote what I thought (and mostly still think). This is my
opinion. If I wrote it in an insulting way, let me apologize. It was not
what I intended.
> Please, read my message again. This is _not_ what I suggested and I
> think that Sven and the others understood my message correctly.
You did wrote this, whatever you really meant to write. And since you also
wrote verbosely about your reasoning (which was based on "facts" which were
wrong), I came to the conclusion that you lack a good enough understanding of
the situation.
Even when we all know now your real intentions now, I don't see what not
telling you about my conclusions would have helped: You posted something
(which was wrong), and I posted what I think needed corrections.
> why I wrote that "most" of them should be disabled. By "most", I mean
What you actually wrote was this: "the configure script should skip the
installation of the Perl-Fu scripts when...".
You also wrote (later):
"For these reasons, I think that it would be better to use the "safe"
method: do not install any (or most of the) Perl-Fu scripts if..."
What you might have wanted to write, and what you actually wrote, are two
different things. "most" was mentioned as an alternative.
I am sure that you didn't do this deliberately: _really_ (I mean, why
should you? I do not always believe in the worst ;). Nevertheless what
you write was wrong, and the conclusions very unfortunate and not very
sensible. Your mail just reassures me that you were not intending what you
wrote, but it does not really change what you very actually _did_ wrote.
> all those that depend on a module that is not present. And as I wrote
> above, a module that uses Gtk (even if it is optional) should be
> considered as requiring it.
This is fine. Now we all know it ;) Raphael, you didn't write this in
your first mail, and there is nothing wrong with it: I just posted a
correction, that's why this forum exists. I don't think there is anything
to worry for you :(
> For example, I do not have the AAlib on my PC. All I got is _one_
> warning during the "configure" step and then I never had to bother
> with this again. Same with the MPEG library. I am probably missing
Your comparison is flawed: most of the plug-ins I wrote, for example,
do very sensible things in their default configurations (simple effects
for example). The plug-ins you mentioned, however, do not even compile
without the library.
> > In any case, I would suggest to ignore Raphael's suggestion and
> > concentrate on fixing existing bugs.
>
> Back to the facts: currently, anyone installing the Gimp on a "normal"
> UNIX system (i.e. from any major Linux distribution, or Solaris, and
> so on, that has perl but not the optional modules from CPAN) gets a
> version of the Gimp in which a large number of options do not work. I
> consider that as a serious bug.
Well, then allow me the question of why you haven't bothered to treat it
as such, and tell people so it can be fixed? What you did was asking for
the respective plug-ins (actually, all of them) to be disabled, and, as a
fortunate side-effect, you also posted something like a bug-report (with
some wrong conclusions, but I take what I get).
> Perl modules from CPAN (no Internet connection, no administrative
> rights, whatever) then the best workaround for the moment is "make
> uninstall ; configure --disable-perl ; make ; make install"
Yes. Other (frequent) bugs do not have a workaround except a cvs update
-dlast_week_please. In any case, reporting this enlarges the chances of it
being fixed.
> not a good solution. I was suggesting something else that would be
> nicer for the user.
I don't think that a buggy gimp (that just refuses to install buggy parts)
is nicer to the user than a fixed one.
> Please do not dismiss this solution by claiming (more or less) that I do
> not know what I am talking about.
You started your reasoning by starting at "facts" that were wrong. So yes,
I think in this very case you had no idea what you were talking about. At
least it had not much connection with actualy reality. Please don't view
this as personal attack. I really think that bad about that mail ;-> I do
not question your competence witht he gimp in general, not even in that
situation. But you clearly started with wrong information in the first
place, which gives your conclusions a very bad ground.
> Ignoring the problem and criticizing those who report it is not a good
> way to solve it.
You didn't report it in the first place, as you wrote above. Please find
out that, in the meantime (I am very short on time), I took the usable
parts of your mail (actualy bug reports) and fixed most of it. Yet most of
your mail was wrong, and quite useless to me indeed.
> After we solve the installation problem, we could also solve the other
> bugs that I detected (the fact that most scripts cannot run, even with
> the default values).
Yeees ;->
> As I said, my previous message was not intended to be a bug report and I
> am sorry if you assumed that it was my intent.
I would have very much _wished_ that this would have been your intent. I
am even more shocked (so to say) to find out that your intention was not
at all to report existing bugs.
I personally find bug-reports _much_ more productive than wrong reasoning,
coupled with substantial conclusions.
> I simply included the error messages as a way to illustrate
> the problems and I thought that these problems had been known for a
If you hadn't included them, the problems still were not fixed, not even
partially. Yes, bug-reports are actually a good thing, although many
people do not think so, but I can't help them anyway.
> long time and that everybody could reproduce them easily.
I fell in that trap a few times myself. Even reporting a bug many times
(remember that happened to me not long ago) to different locations does
not ensure that people get to know about it.
> Do you want me to post (to you or to the list) a list of all error
> reports from the scripts when I start them with the default values?
Yes, just bombard myself (and, optionally, the original authur of that
part), as gimp-developers is not the place where the many thousands of
reports I expect should be posted ;)
> did not post that because the full list would be a bit long and I doubt
> that I can provide any info that you could not get easily by yourself.
Telling me "Filters/Was/Auch/Immer does not run when I start it with
default values / values x y z" is more than enough. If I cannot reproduce
it I will ask you anyway. I just cannot test all the many plug-ins after
every change myself.
--
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---==---(_)__ __ ____ __ Marc Lehmann +--
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-=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ XX11-RIPE --+
The choice of a GNU generation |
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