From: Sven Neumann <sven@xxxxxxxx> Date: 14 Mar 2004 01:33:10 +0100 Robert L Krawitz <rlk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Just to make it clear: the reason we don't use Glib in the core > is that it isn't part of the standard load on a lot of platforms > (in particular, OS X). We've had enough issues on OS X with > Ghostscript, which is *necessary* (there's no workaround > whatsoever) in a lot of cases; OS X users want a single binary > blob. We've made a conscious choice that we're going to play as > well as possible with the working methods of OS X users. OS X > users are already suspicious enough of the UNIX core (command > line geeks) and don't want to be reminded of the fact. They see > their computers as appliances. I really don't want to get into an argument with you but glib-2.0 (or rather 2.2 and soon 2.4) works just fine on MacOS X, is easy to install through fink or darwinports and it would help you to avoid a good deal of code duplication. Fink and Darwinports are simply not options for mainline OS X users. Mac users want to literally buy a machine and turn it on. Think about what happens when you buy a lamp, you plug it into the wall and turn it on. They're amazingly close to that, with things like Airport. >From a user engineering standpoint, it's a tour de force. Fink Commander (a GUI interface to Fink) is quite difficult to set up. It's not trivial for me, and I understand things like CVS, and I know the relationships between the different packages. Macintosh users don't, and they absolutely don't want to. We've had this discussion before in a different context. I don't think that most people in the free software world really understand this point. >From an software engineering standpoint I want to avoid code duplication. From a user perspective, architecture and implementation don't help them get their job done. > I tried a while back to install Gnumeric on my SuSE 8.1 (not even > 18 months old) systems, and it was a horrible mess indeed. I had > to install more or less the entire GNOME stack, and that caused > other problems with older Gnome 2 stuff in SuSE. gnumeric is a GNOME application. Of course it needs a full GNOME stack. We are talking about glib here, which has no dependencies. Fair enough. > If the problem's with the Print plugin or libgimpprintui, we can > obviously afford to use Glib 1.2 (there are lots of GIMP 1.2 users > out there, and I don't want to break them). glib-1.2 doesn't have the functionality you need in order to handle the problem this thread started about. Besides that, it is not any longer maintained and it is missing support for Unicode and UTF-8 and you can hardly get away without that nowadays. I think we have a problem when something goes from current to obsolete in 18 months. I upgrade my systems roughly every 3 releases; SuSE spaces releases 6-8 months apart, so we're talking an 18-24 month cycle. Note what happened when Microsoft tried to drop support for Windows 98 (which is somewhat older); even they were forced to backtrack; a lot of people are still using Windows 95 and earlier because it works for them. Dropping support for GIMP 1.2 simply means that people won't be able to use Gimp-Print 5.0 with it. I want Gimp-Print to be at the bleeding edge of printer quality and support, on both current and older printers (we still get a lot of questions about printers such as the Epson 3000 and even the 600, which is at least 6 years old). Note that theoretical support for a printer is useless if it won't run on somebody's system, so we've deliberately been very conservative about adopting newer support technologies. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@xxxxxxxxxxxx Project lead for Gimp Print -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton
