Re: gnome developer docs - not sgml

["Brandon S. Allbery" <allbery ece cmu edu>]

+----- From: Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr>
| spblunt@ozemail.com.au (Steven Blunt) writes:
| 
| > It's all very nice to tell someone else to fix it, but in this case
| > most off the someone elses don't use your OS.  The only way it will
| > get fixed is if you or someone else running your OS ports it and
| > submits the patches.
| 
| All true, but keep in mind that it's very hard to fix things if they
| continually get broken by developers who don't use non-Linux systems,
| and don't care for those who do.  Taking GNU extensions to various
| utilities for granted is one such example.
| 
| Because of this, I sometimes wonder if Gnome will ever work reliably
| on a non-Linux OS.
+--->8

That's pretty much where I'm coming from.  For example, I reported that
wait3()/union wait stuff in two different GNOME components a month ago; it
was cleaned up promptly in those packages, but it keeps springing back up
in other places.  This gets rather frustrating after a while.

Another instance was the snprintf() stuff.  I finally hooked in a library
which provided it because various things didn't cope properly with systems
that didn't have it (most commonly, something linked against -ldb would
fall over during the link because db provides its own version) only to find
that various configure scripts wouldn't let me do *that* while testing for
e.g. glib.  Ultimately I built a GNOME-specific db so I could make it all
work, and had to "hide" the regular version that ECE software uses (thank-
fully, it's not a shared library --- I'm still waiting for something to fall
over because of the other two copies of libtiff.so on here, in /usr/local/lib
and /use/openwin/lib, none compatible with the others).

Basically, I'm in a twisty maze of little libraries, all incompatible :-/
and it's been causing me problems.  I've had to re-release a number of ECE
packages built on here because bits of GNOME leaked in (and pushed some
bits into ECE packages to work around it in other cases); now I don't build
ECE packages on here and warn others not to do so.  Once or twice programs
from the ECE "suite" and the GNOME "suite" have collided, with occasionally
very annoying results.  Then there's all the GNOME stuff that looks for
"main in -lrx" and promptly tries to link against the AFS RPC library....
*thud*thud*thud*  I can't get rid of the ECE stuff and GNOME is in no way
ready to be added to the existing ECE packages, and I can't get an additional
"un-facilitized" SPARC box to do GNOME work on :-(

-- 
brandon s. allbery	[os/2][linux][solaris][japh]	 allbery@kf8nh.apk.net
system administrator	     [WAY too many hats]	   allbery@ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering
carnegie mellon university			   (bsa@kf8nh is still valid.)