Hello,
Peter Anderson wrote:
I
did not intend my original post to start a flame war! As a bit of
background, I have been trying to make the switch from Windows to Linux
for several years now. As a retired programmer/manager I have an
interest (some might call it a obsession) with editors. I still
develop web sites for not-for-profit organisations and dabble with a
bit of programming (Python, Logo and Scheme). What I am really looking
for is a Linux version of TextPad or NoteTab from the Windows world.
The lack of comparable editors in the Linux world is one of the major
reasons I have not switched permanently.
[..]
My original request was to try and find a similar binary package for
G-edit and if it was not available then to ask the G-edit world to
consider making such packages available - not an unreasonable request I
would have thought.
Again, it is _not_ my intention to fan a flame war, just try and move
Linux along a little and make it a little easier for new users like
myself (see my signature text at the end of my e-mails?). Please take
this message in that light. Think how grateful many G-edit users would
be if they could easily up-grade such a good editor when new features
and fixes become available - you would certainly have my thanks!
My intention, and the one of others I'm sure, was to be helpful,
nothing else.
Maybe a more detailled attempt to explain the current situation:
- debian and ubuntu distributions by policy do not backport
officially newer packages on stable distributions. fedora for instance
does it sometimes
- some software makes packages available that also work on older
versions of distributions (firefox, the ones you quoted, etc)
Many people, me included, answered on #1 but you were interested only
in #2.
For #2, the answer of why it's currently not done is:
- software which is available also for older versions of
distributions is very careful on dependencies (libraries which they
require for working). they make the software so that it doesn't require
too recent versions of packages. that way making it work on a variety
of distributions is possible
- this is not GNOME's way: GNOME 2.16 requires GTK 2.10 for
instance, while dapper only has GTK 2.8. gedit uses a lot of GNOME's
libraries. Porting the GNOME libraries that gedit uses and gedit 2.16
to GTK 2.8 (allowing a backport to dapper), or porting GTK 2.10 to
dapper (allowing a backport to dapper, upgrading many dapper packages)
would be a huge task. and GTK is not the only library that changed
(cairo is another example)
- even if GNOME and gedit were more careful about dependencies,
building and testing packages on a variety of distributions (and
potentially processor architectures) is still a lot of work, which
noone decided to do so far for gedit
To conclude, if someone volunteers, making such packages could be
possible but probably not without programming (the only reasonnable
solution would be to port gedit 2.16 to using gnome 2.14 and gtk 2.8,
same for other dependencies).
So, it's more complicated for gedit to do that than it is under
windows, because windows doesn't change much, while linux's libraries
change a lot very often.
I hope I was helpful.
emmanuel
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