Re: [Gimp-developer] xdg-app; was: WGO Transition Meeting

[Michael Natterer <mitch gimp org>]

On Tue, 2015-11-17 at 11:17 +0300, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 11:07 AM, Sam Gleske wrote:
>
> > I'd rather dpkg -i or rpm -i to install a package than use a 3rd
> > party
> > app.  For Windows/Mac platforms I'd say it's useful but for Linux I
> > don't
> > have much of a use for it.  I had proposed a 3rd party platform to
> > be
> > distro-independent in the past (Steam) but there wasn't much
> > interest
> > around supporting that.
>
> Sam, I think I'm missing something. What's really needed is a static
> build of up-to-date version of GIMP. That's all.
>
> It doesn't have to be RPM, and it doesn't have to be DEB. It doesn't
> even have to be installable. A simple static build inside a tarball,
> provided by download.gimp.org, will work just fine. Thousands and
> thousands of Blender users will confirm.

There is no such thing as a "simple static build" of GIMP and its
dependencies. There are gazillions of loadable modules in our 
libraries, I really don't see what a static build would improve.

We need a *relocatable* build, but it doesn't need to be static.

- build all deps into a prefix
- enable relocation on all of them where needed/possible
- provide a launcher script
- tar up the install prefix
- ...
- profit

--Mitch