Emmanuel Touzery wrote:
Hello,
Peter Anderson wrote:
...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
Emmanuel,
Thanks for your considered and detailed reply. I certainly understand
more about the current process than I did before. I presume from all
of the above that the only way one gets an upgrade for G-edit is to
upgrade GNOME and the only way to upgrade GNOME is to upgrade to the
latest release of your favourite distribution (Ubuntu in my case).
This may sound naive, but its not a particularly user friendly approach
and while I understand what happens I'm not sure this is a systems
building approach I would have taken during my working days. It
certainly makes the value of Ubuntu's "Long Term Support" claim a bit
dubious.
If I could ask one last question - is it possible to upgrade the
complete GNOME environment on say Ubuntu 6.06 or is that just too
difficult.
Thanks again for bearing with my uninformed requests and for providing
such a sound reply.
Regards,
Peter
--
Peter Anderson
E: peter anderson internode on net
P: +61 (0)2 4472 2274
M: +61 (0)418 249 648
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to
conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the
introduction of a new order of things — Niccolo Machiavelli, The
Prince, ch. 6
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