Re: How come GNOME is hard to install.

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel nuclecu unam mx>]

> In order to start even the compilation of GNOME,
> one must have a huge amount of libraries,
> such as: GTK+, GLib, imlib, (requires libpng/gif/jpeg), ORBit, esound,
> libXml, others.

This is a very interesting comment, and I would like to take this
chance to point something out:

If we have a lot of libraries, it basically means that we have a lot
of reusable code.  Either we wrote this code and we are reusing it in
a number of places, or we are reusing other people's code.

Lets classify those libraries:

	- GLIB; Algorithmic, C utility and robustness library.
	
	  It helps out a lot, since we do not reinvent the same code
	  over and over.
	
	- Imlib: It allows GNOME apps to scale, dither and load pretty
	  much every single graphic file on earth.  
	
	  Instead of re-inventing this, we are just going to reuse all 
	  this code.

	- ORBit: Our super-glue engine.  

	- ESound: it has its origins in the E project.  Instead of
	  adding our own version of this, we are reusing a component
	  that someone else coded.

	- gnome-xml: This is actually pretty much optional and it is
	  only used by the bigger applications.  And yes, this code is 
	  reused from the Web consortium.

Miguel.
-- 
miguel@gnu.org