Re: GNOME 2.0 Desktop Release Candidate 1: "Fever Pitch"

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Fri, Jun 14, 2002 at 10:19:23PM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
[...]
> Build Requirements
> ------------------
> 
>   - The tarballs included in the release. :-)
> 
>   - Some very basic packages not distributed with this release, such as
> 	image libraries, popt and freetype. These should all be included with or
> 	available for your distribution.

Many things are available for my particular distribution, however this
doesn't tell me which particular ones I need that may not be installed
by default (and there are multiple traps for the unwary here). And if
you start trying to build from sources you will get quite a long way
before discovering that something was missing that crippled an earlier
build, causing chaos much later.

I have a longer mail to send on this point today, but having just
witnessed one very advanced user really struggle to get GNOME built and
running nicely as an upgrade from 1.4 on a couple of his machines, we
need to be a lot more explicit in the release notes for 2.0.0 (probably
via a link to an accurate page on www.gnome.org or something).

Since the gods have conspired to force me to be at work today, but not
actually doing very much (just monitoring some tests running in another
country), I will knock up something about pre-requisites and send a mail
or two to this list so that others can start adding. In particular, the
Debian requirements will need to be added by somebody else, since I
don't use that distribution at all and it's a non-trivial mapping from
Red Hat packages to Debian packages (whereas, say, Red Hat --> Mandrake
is usually possible for a person to work out or for somebody familiar
with the distro to just go "change here, rename this, etc").

Malcolm

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