Hi Sven, On Monday 28 July 2003 4:55 pm, Sven Neumann wrote: > Could you please explain what's so painful about it? Almost all > distributions include packages for it for quite some time already and > even compiling from source is pretty much straight-forward. OK, maybe "painful" was an exaggeration; really it was just time-consuming; I'm using SuSE 8.0, and don't have -devel packages for even gtk+-1.2 packages on the original CDs. The point I was trying to make was that needing full devel packages for all of the GTK2 stuff, including Pango-FT2 (and hence FreeType itself and Xft2/FontConfig) does constitute a barrier-to-entry (especially with a 56K dialup net connection), and is not something I'd go through just to play with the latest version of one particular app. Doing it for a specific purpose (i.e. adapting my patch for the latest version of GIMP) is a different matter entirely, but in the first instance a patch will be developed because someone saw a need in a piece of software they were using - and in most cases that will be the Stable version. The release of 2.0 will make a big difference, because binary packages will become standard in distributions, so people will be using 2.0 when they recognise a particular need... > Please note that during the 1.3 development process we did never > depend on the very latest versions of the required libraries. We > always assured that even debian testing which is a very conservative > distribution has the packages available that are needed to build > GIMP-1.3. If we decided to change our dependencies to a newer version, > we always checked if this is really necessary. Yes, I wasn't complaining of bleeding-edge requirements as such - merely attempting to explain a phenomenon that had been noted, and to which I had contributed :) Ultimately though, GTK2 build environments are still not as common as GTK1 build environments, so for many people, building the stable version is less hassle. All the best, -- Alastair M. Robinson Email: blackfive@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Amount of pizza eaten each day in the U.S.: 75 acres. -- "Harper's Magazine"
