Adam D. Moss wrote:
> I'm interested, from a project point of view, why many (a good
> proportion) of the patches that we get on this mailing list or
> in bugzilla from 'external' (non-CVS-account) contributors are
> against 1.2.x.
I think there are a few reasons for this. The biggest of them is
that setting up a gimp 1.3 compile environment is very time
consuming. Usually to be able to build from CVS, you need to
upgrade/install automake, autoconf, libtool, gettext, intltool to
start with, then get all the modules (png, jpeg, etc) installed
with headers, then get a working devel environment of gtk+ with
pangoft2, freetype2, fontconfig and the rest. Then finally you
can start autogening and making the gimp.
When GNOME2 becomes more or less ubiquitous on distributions, and
it is easily installable off distribution CDs with devel
packages, and fontconfig gets onto pretty much every linux box,
then it'll be easier to get up & going for the gimp. As it is, to
get a gimp 1.3 build environment for most people means passing
several hours installing packages you don't have and probably
don't particularly want. Plus, in the past that build environment
has changed pretty drastically several times with no real prior
notice, which puts people off maintaining a working build.
At least, that's my theory :)
> Identifying the cause of this weakness would help to smooth
> the bumps in accepting (very welcome) external contributions.
I agree. I think we need to do a little more to get developpment
gimps built by more people. Exactly what, I don't know. Wait for
GNOME2 to take over the world, perhaps?
Cheers,
Dave.
--
David Neary,
Lyon, France
E-Mail: bolsh@xxxxxxxx
