GNOME 2.0 Summary

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

The contents of this mail can be found in GNOME CVS in
gnome-2-plan/gnome-2-summary.txt.

I'll send a "GNOME 2.0 Current Status" and a
"GNOME 2.0 How you can help" mail shortly.

====================================================================

[This document is released under the GNU Free Documentation License;
 doing larger improvements in this file will get you a free coffee at
 next GUADEC :-) ]

Hi guys,

I think it's now time for a little summary about what's going
on with GNOME 2.0 and how you can help with it.

As you might already know, we have several new CVS modules for
GNOME 2.0. Here's a list of all of them together with a description
and in the correct compilation order. Unless otherwise specified,
all modules come from CVS HEAD.

Before you start compiling this stuff, read on, there are some very
useful scripts for this in the vicious-build-scripts modules.

The GNOME 2.0 modules
=====================

First of all, the "base libraries" aka "the non-GNOME dependencies":
-------------------------------------------------------------------

* pkg-config - you need the one from pkgconfig.sourcefourge.net.

* glib, pango, gtk+

* gnome-common - all that's left here are the autoconf macros and
     the autogen.sh script; this is a `noarch' package, you can
     use the same one for GNOME 1.x and GNOME 2.x.

     This package also contains libgnomesupport, but it's disabled
     since it's currently unused.

* gnome-xml - this is libxml 2 from CVS HEAD

* ORBit-martin-forked - this is taken from orbit-stable-0-5, but has the
     API of ORBit2 so that it'll be very easy to switch to ORBit2 once
     its usable.

     Using ORBit2 has two problems:

     a) Elliot Lee refuses to add pkg-config files to it

     b) It doesn't work yet; the idl-compiler produces files which do
        not compile and if you fix this manually, it still doesn't work.

        If someone wants to work on it, the best way is to first fix a)
        and then hack on it (because if you add the pkg-config files to
        ORBit2 you can just replace ORBit-martin-forked with ORBit2 and
        then recompile all your stuff if you want to hack on it).

* oaf, gconf

* xml-i18n-tools - same as for GNOME 1.x

* gnome-vfs - this is from CVS HEAD.

  The version of gnome-vfs in CVS HEAD works with both GNOME 1.x and 2.x,
  except that you need pkg-config even if you're on GNOME 1.x.

  (FIXME: Someone please remind me that I wanted to send Darin a patch
          which removes the gnome-common dependency)

* libart_lgpl - from CVS HEAD

If you have reached this line, then you have all the "non-GNOME"
dependencies (or call it "base libraries") and you can start compiling
the new GNOME 2 libraries.

Michael Meeks has made a very nice Dia diagramm which shows you all
the dependencies. You can find it in libgnome/doc/depends.dia.

So let's start with the GNOME 2 modules:
---------------------------------------

* libbonobo

  This is the non-X part of Bonobo which has been ported to GObject.

  It is maintained by Miguel de Icaza and Michael Meeks.

* libgnome

  This comes from gnome-libs/libgnome; it depends on libbonobo.

* libgnomecanvas

  The GNOME Canvas. It depends on GTK+ and Pango, but on no other
  GNOME 2 module.

  It is maintained by Federico Mena Quintera.

* libbonoboui

  The Bonobo UI code. It has a "weak" dependency on libgnome, but it
  is intended to be usable as a stand-alone library, this libgnome
  dependency may even go away in future.

  It is maintained by Miguel de Icaza and Michael Meeks.

* libgnomeui

  This comes from gnome-libs/libgnomeui. It depends on libbonoboui and
  most of the other GNOME 2 modules (see depends.dia).

* libcompat

  This is a compatibility library which contains all the code which has
  been removed from libgnome and libgnomeui because it's deprecated for
  GNOME 2.0.

  We should keep everything in here unchanged and only do the necessary
  GTK+ 2.0 porting work to it.

How to get the beast compiled
=============================

George Lebl has written some super-cool build scripts which you can find
in the vicious-build-scripts module. This is also the prefered way to
compile GNOME 2; there's a README file in the vicious-build-scripts module
which explains you how to use them. Btw. the scripts support multiple build
environments, so you can also compile your GNOME 1.x with them !

May 2nd, 2001
Martin Baulig <baulig suse de>

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin gnome org (private)
baulig suse de (work)