Re: How come GNOME is hard to install.

[Gerald Gutierrez <gutier intergate bc ca>]

At 08:48 PM 2/15/99 -0600, you wrote:
>
>> 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.

Code reuse is inherently good and I don't think the original poster
intended to say otherwise. I believe his problem is that he must find all
those packages  and compile them himself, which /should/ be an unnecessary
task since he is doing no development himself. In fact, I agree with him
that it can be incredibly difficult to install GNOME. I spent two to three
days just compiling GNOME and dependency ( like db2 ) packages just so I
can see GNOME in action. Why can't I simply download one big file and have
everything I need inside? Duplicates? Okay. I don't see why there can't be
scripts which discover what libraries are missing so that only the
necessary packages are downloaded. While we're at it, why not have binary
distributions for the three or four most used platforms. There only exist
RPMs for Linux as far as I know.

Perhaps all this can happen come the 1.0 release of GNOME. I accept the
argument many make that GNOME is currently in development and time is
better spent in the code than in the installation procedure.