Re: complete system or individual components?

[Elliot Lee <sopwith cuc edu>]

n Sun, 22 Mar 1998, Nathan Froyd wrote:

> When I first heard about ElectricEyes (hereafter EE), I was ecstatic. I
> downloaded the first beta version as soon as it was available and was
> incredibly impressed. I heard it was being integrated into GNOME and
> didn't care - until I tried the CVS version. There I discovered that the
> source had been changed so that it was unable to compile without most of
> GNOME being installed.
> 
> Does this sound like software bloat to anybody?

Not so far...

> GNOME and other desktop environments should not be clones of CDE but
> rather a set of programs that share the same look and feel.

In order to provide that look and feel you either
	(a) rewrite the same stuff in each & every program to provide
	    aforesaid look and
	(b) write a library that does the same stuff for all programs

The consensus is that (b) works much better.

> Understandably, some components will require GNOME libraries - the help
> browser for example - but "little" programs such as EE should not be
> dependent upon a massive set of stuff being installed. 

"Massive set of stuff" being gtk+, imlib, and gnome-libs, I take it?

The idea behind shared libraries is to share as much code as possible
between programs so that memory usage is at a minimum. Less bloat that
way.

I don't see it as terribly hard to compile a total of four different
packages to get the end result of ee, especially when .rpm's of all of
them are available somewhere.

Would I be right in saying that you're probably annoyed because compiling
the stuff was a pain for you? (Hey, nobody said developer's interim
snapshot work was a piece of cake to get running ;-)

-- Elliot			http://www.redhat.com/
Chicken Little was right.