Re: Our (real) problems

[Bill Gribble <grib linuxdevel com>]

On 30 Aug 2001 23:34:29 -0400, Alex Larsson wrote: 
> One of the RedHat toolchain people and ELF guru (Jakub Jelinek) said
> this:
> > > > So how long will it take till an average GNOME or KDE program will need half
> > > > the number of shared libraries than now?
> > > 
> > > /me points at gnucash and laughs again.
> >
> > Oh crap, 59. Shouldn't we start talking about efficiency to those folks? 

The attributions are a little messed up so I'm not sure who said what 
here, but please, start talking.  The gnucash people are listening. If
you can tell me how to get all the functionality we want without
requiring people to have that functionality installed I'll change the
code right away. Answers that require me to rewrite significant amounts
of code that are already finished and freely available aren't
acceptable, sorry.

All we did was adopt the Gnome environment and write a serious
application which uses it.  The shared libs we require are the standard
Gnome development environment plus Guppi.  If you can compile and run
evolution, all you need to compile gnucash is guppi and a tiny
Scheme program called g-wrap which generates Guile bindings for our
C libs. 

The main problem with gnucash right now is that either people don't
understand how to use RPM or its defaults for "upgrade" vs. "install"
are wrong... whenever the libtool interface number of a lib is bumped,
they remove the old version when installing the new one (usually for
evolution) and that breaks anything depending on the released version of
the lib.  

Part of this is related to the fact that people making RPMs for Gnome
don't seem to care about keeping baseline versions of Gnome 1.4
installed.  In my opinion, having Gnome 1.4 installed means that you
keep the most recent release of ALL the library major versions that were
released with the Gnome 1.4, and install new versions along side them
rather than instead of them.  What's the point of a point release if
people packaging software that uses Gnome can't depend on the software
in the point release being installed? 

Bill Gribble