Quite curious to see a GTK discussion come up here (off topic)
I haven't personally used gbuffy, but it is an abandoned project, and hasn't been maintained for quite some time. 0.2.6. is the most current stable release.
But I can speak about the GTK1 dependency issue. You could technically port gbuffy to use GTK2 or newer. However that is not my area of expertise and it is likely not worthwhile. There are alternatives to gbuffy as mentioned.
GTK1 (any GTK1 version) will not compile on a modern Linux system. There are many reasons for this. Last winter I started updating it for reasons not relevant here. Between different compiler standards and such it is extremely time consuming and painstaking. It is even worse than updating QT2 (which I do have a working fork of). Even if GTK1 would compile (which even my fork of GTK1 doesn't compile completely yet), there are other issues such as freedesktop.org compatibility, etc. that would have to be considered. I haven't specifically looked at gbuffy source code but it's old enough to have these sort of issues. In addition, even with an updated GTK1 library, gbuffy would likely need to have some work done as well. While legacy X11 applications can usually be compiled against X.Org and will run on X.Org, there are issues with it still. There are no working updated GTK1 ports that I am aware of. Keeping legacy versions of libraries side by side with newer ones is often a bit of trouble as well.
Essentially what I am saying is it is not feasible to use a GTK1 based program on a modern Linux system. But thanks to open source, if you are so inclined you could take the task on to port to a newer GTK version or write a replacement for gbuffy.
Best of luck!
On Sep 12, 2017 8:06 PM, "A. F. Cano" <afc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 01:24:40AM +0000, Duncan wrote:
> ...
It was exactly what I wanted. A simple list of buttons that I can have
> And there's all sorts of other mail notifiers available, so the question
> is, why are you trying to install something that old, unsupported,
> security-vulnerable and inconvenient to install, when there are so many
> other alternatives available? What's so special about gbuffy that you
> /must/ use it instead of some other alternative that's still available in
> your distro's repo for a far simpler install?
in a corner of the desktop and when I click the one that represents the
list I want to read it launches a konsole window with mutt in it.
I've installed or looked over all the packages you mentioned, but only
> FWIW, the gbuffy descriptions I could google said similar to xbiff/
> xbuffy. On gentoo (which I use) simply doing a package search, including
xbuffy gives me that interface, so it looks like that's what I'll have
to go with, even though the font looks horrendous compared to gbuffy,
the config file is totally different and I'm still having issues getting
it to behave the way gbuffy did. Some of the issues really look like
bugs, such as starting mutt in send mode in some cases, even when given
a mailbox file or doing the same when what it should do is open the main
incoming mailbox. I'll have to make sure it's not an issue with my
config file before filing bug reports.
Interestingly, this one is not in Debian.
> description, on "biff", returns a number of alternatives, some console,
> some X-based. Debian is said to have a larger package repo than most
> distros so it's likely to have these and more:
>
> * kbiff (kde-based, making it the actual on-topic _one_ =:^)
The gnubiff window is way too big and obtrusive to keep open.
> * gnubiff (gtk3-based, with a gtk2-based version also available, likely
> the most direct actually still available in the repo alternative to
> gbuffy)
All these don't have the simple one-button-per-mailbox interface I want.
> * xbiff
> * hap (terminal-based biff replacement)
> * asmail (similar to xbiff, so X-based)
> * wmbiff (windowmaker dock applet)
> ...
In any case, thanks for replying. I'll keep trying to configure xbuffy
to behave like gbuffy did.
Augustine
