On Fri, 28 Feb 2003 01:02:48 +0100, <pcg@xxxxxxxx ( Marc) (A.) (Lehmann )> wrote: > On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 02:04:51PM +0100, Raphaël Quinet <quinet@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > - Gimp-Perl is broken and is not maintained > > Well, I don't know of anything like "gimp-perl is broken". I think that > build problems that are due to people using the wrong compiler (like on > irix), or problems with gtk-perl (that I am still not aware of) do not > warrant such wording as "gimp-perl is broken". Even if the problems were only due to the build/install process, I think that it would be appropriate to say that "gimp-perl is broken". The result is that it is not possible for some users to use gimp-perl. And although gimp-perl works for most people in the 1.2.x releases, this is not the case for GIMP 1.3.x, in which gimp-perl is really "broken". I am not blaming you for that, but the current version is simply not working. Some of the build or installation problems are not specific to gimp-perl and are shared by all programs that have to install Perl modules. One example that comes to my mind is that most UNIX systems other than Linux (Solaris, IRIX, AIX, etc.) include a version of Perl with the OS (pre-installed or available as an optional package). This version is compiled with the vendor's compiler, which is not installed by default. Those who do not want to pay extra for the vendor's compiler install some version of gcc. But then this causes problems while compiling or linking Perl modules because the compilers are different. Another problem is for non-root users who install everything in a non-standard directory but still have problems with the Perl modules that cannot be installed because the user does not have write access to the Perl directories. It is possible to avoid these problems by building and installing a second version of Perl or by installing the Gimp-Perl files in a private directory and playing with @INC, but this is not trivial. >From that point of view, it would make sense to distribute the Perl plug-ins as a separate package. Regardless of its merits, this part of the GIMP has typically caused more installation problems than the other parts. Distributing it separately will ensure that more people can easily get a basic GIMP installation working. Now, regarding the problems with Gtk-Perl, this is something that I experienced: I tried to fetch it from CPAN and build it on Solaris 2.6, using Perl 5.8.0. I got many errors while compiling and linking. In the end, it compiled but I got random crashes in any script that was using the Gtk module. I spent a few hours trying to fix that, but in the end I gave up. Also, the current version of Gtk-Perl has lots of optional dependencies on various GNOME components, libxml and other things. It also depends on XML::Writer and XML::Parser. Since this system did not have any of these, I had to supply a nice list of options (the order of some of them is significant): o conf makepl_arg "--without-gtkhtml --without-gtkglarea --without-gdkimlib --without-gtkxmhtml --without-gnome --without-gnomeprint --without-applets" So building Gtk-Perl is not very easy. It works on Linux, though (with the old GTK+ 1.2.10). > Also, gimp-perl not being maintained is news to me. Who claims this?? I > was under the impression that I was the maintainer, and I certainly still > maintain it. Where do you have this "gimp-perl is not maintained"? Or has > the maintainer silently changed without the maintainer knowing it? Of course, you are still the maintainer. But in practice, the Perl part in GIMP 1.3 is not actively maintained. Currently, it just does not work with the current versions of libgimp, GTK+ 2.x, etc. Also, I just saw Sven's message listing some of the bugs that are still open. Those affected by these bugs are probably thinking that the Perl part is not actively maintained. This happens to other parts of the GIMP as well: there are several long-standing bugs in some plug-ins or parts of the core. Even if they have an official maintainer, there is not much happening in some areas. > I really wonder what is going on here, but there is a great deal of > confusion and misinformation going on... > I don't think that it is intentional. -Raphaël
