Re: [Gimp-developer] Portable development environment for GIMP

[Jehan Pagès <jehan marmottard gmail com>]

Hi,

On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 9:04 PM, Sam Gleske <sam mxracer gmail com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 11:55 AM, Michael Schumacher <schumaml gmx de>
> wrote:
>
> > GIMP developers use Debian Testing, with the assumption that is anything
> > is present there, then a GIMP build can require it.
> >
> > A build based on Debian Jessie, currently aka Debian Stable, will divert
> > from that over time, and might not even contain some of the required
> > dependencies. Due to the recent release of Jessie, this is not very
> > noticeable yet.
> >
> > A moving target like Debian Testing is probably a less than optimal
> > building block for a vagrant-based approach.
>
>
> I'm aware the core devs use Debian testing.  I would have used Debian
> testing but currently there's no Debian testing in any of the tooling like
> Vagrant [1] and Docker [2].  However, as time progresses, and new Debian
> versions come out, the development tooling can to be updated to newer
> Debian versions before any anticipated or noticeable divergence occurs.

Actually not all core devs. Over time, I have built GIMP on Mageia,
Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu), and now Fedora. Though it is true that
at times, I happened sometimes to be forced to build more dependencies
than just babl and GEGL on Mageia or Mint, I believe my only built
dependencies on Fedora 22 are babl and GEGL (and Fedora 23 is out very
soon, I heard). I even see that there are babl 0.1.12 and GEGL 0.3
available in official Fedora repo, allowing to even build GIMP alone
if you want to.

Just to say that it is very possible to build GIMP very easily on all
sort of distributions, on some with more self-built dependencies
depending than on others, of course.

> If a divergence becomes a regular problem then perhaps it would be more
> useful to fall back on developing in a more stable platform.  Though, since
> that isn't currently an issue it's just a thought.

It is true that it can become an issue sometimes (I had the case on
Mint not long before I switched away as we up-ed some dependencies
that I had to build), but as long as we upgrade dep versions for good
reasons (like: upgrade a required minimum version because we want to
make use of a new feature or prevent a very annoying known bug, not
just to have a higher version!), I think this is normal for a dev
build to use recent versions of some dependencies.

Jehan