Boofhead bug reporter on gnomedesktop.org

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

So,

Some boofhead thought that gnomedesktop.org was a reasonable place to inform
us about GARNOME problems. I'd be wildly surprised if said Boofhead bothered
to follow up to the list, so here's Boofhead's List and some comments.

> - BUILD_CLEAN mode still doesn't work (it evaluates the option before
> reading the config option)

Fixed.

> - Several patches don't apply without error (e.g. patches to fix pkgconfig
> locations)

Not a particularly useful report, but I do know that there were some patches
that broke due to the -p1 patch generation and handling change. Jan Schmidt
mentioned one lingering bug of this nature in 0.25.0, but there are no more
at all in the tree.

> - misc/fribidi still has embarassing typos in download URL location

Typos in URLs aren't embarrassing, you twat. GARNOME has far more
embarrassing bugs in its short history. :-)

> - gkrellm's download URL doesn't even exist

Works here, but the author seems to remove old tarballs, which is very
annoying (and one of the big reasons why I don't include devel KDE stuff in
GARNOME). Updated.

> - XChat, Pan, Abiword, Bluefish and Sodipodi are far from bleeding edge

Glad you could be bothered to suggest updates and/or send patches. Thanks,
buddy.

Note that I only include the extra stuff in GARNOME for tester convenience.
The stuff I actually care about is the desktop and developer platform
modules, but I know a lot of people run GARNOME as their sole desktop (as do
I), so there's other cool stuff there. If you like the cool stuff, let me
know when I'm missing updates. I always catch stuff on GNOME FTP, and
usually catch stuff on gnome-announce-list. Everything else is random, and
up to people who care. :-)

Some of these issues I miss because I use a complete garchive - which means
I only download stuff when I'm updating versions. So, the disappearing URLs
and 404s are never a problem here. ;-) Everyone who is seriously using
GARNOME should be using a garchive! garchives rock!

Fixed (coming with the point release, tonight).

> - meta/kde is missing, kde/ contains outdated KDE with known security leaks

I killed meta/kde because it was pointless. It's easier to just cd kde/;
make install. However, I've been planning to just pull the KDE stuff out
anyway, because it's no longer particularly useful, and it takes too long to
build, and people who don't read the documentation flame me because they
keep running "make install" in the root directory, and they don't even like
giving KDE people downloads or something. Wackos.

So hey, let's just knife the baby now, hey? Done.

> - the used Gar version is broken, e.g. "make buildclean" doesn't work

This is not entirely useful or true, but hey, sounds like he's having fun.

> - Several packages don't build (on SuSE at least): gnopernicus,
> gnomemeeting, straw, grandr_applet, battfink, gedit-plugins, ghex,
> regexxer - not due to missing libraries or includes but compilation and
> links error. Not sure how much Garnome is to blame is here.

Welcome to the art of testing. One of the important skills one learns as a
tester is the art of bug reporting. If stuff doesn't build, that's a BUG,
and you can lodge it in GNOME's bugzilla (or with the upstream authors) and
Cc the GARNOME list (so we can see the results of GARNOME testing, and make
sure upstream hackers don't have to deal with rare GARNOME build problems).

Build bugs come up all the time, especially on "odd" platforms (which, to me
at least means "everything that isn't Red Hat or Debian" for the most part).
That's part of the fun of testing.

> - Don't even think that Garnome CVS contains a current version.

As has been mentioned so many times on the mailing list...

> In summary, bad maintained and some parts obviously untested. 

Beaujolais! Thank you so much for your encouraging and productive whinging!

Yes, even boofheads get their bugs fixed, much to everyone else's chagrin.

Hooray! :-)

- Jeff

-- 
Get Informed: SCO vs. IBM                            http://sco.iwethey.org/
 
     "I think his crackpipe is mixed with helium or something." - Colin
                           Walters on Hans Reiser