Re: This sucks

[Noah Roberts <jik foxinternet net>]

I want to put my 2cents in.....

I think the main problem with building gnome is that the README does not specify what other packages are required, and the INSTALL file is simply a regurgitated configure howto.  Most project should and many do, specify what is required in at least one of those two files.

Second major problem, configure does not figure out wether it has the correct version of a required package.  Since there are no files saying what is required, you are left running configure and seeing what it fails on.....when configure finishes and creates a Makefile, I expect that package to build.....this may have been fixed a bit more with Gnome 1.4, I don't know because I gave up building gnome and just wait for packages to become available for my system.

Third, something that would make life a lot easier for most of us.......everything that is REQUIRED to run gnome should be in a single package.  There are many packages that are required to build the option gnome programs....when a package says a 'current gnome system is required' then I should be able to go out and download the current gnome system.....things that would go in this package are things like bonobo, GConf, gnome-core......in fact this package should probably be called gnome-core or
base.....gnome-core is a missrepresentation of what that package really is.

As developers we often tend to forget that people have to actually use this stuff.  Many people like to, or have to in the case of Slackware users, compile stuff from scratch.  GNOME is the singly most difficult system to do that that I have ever run into outside of alpha-ware, and most of THAT is even easier to build.  I have years of experience compiling my own packages on Linux, the fact that I could not build gnome says something about how it is packaged.....course you could ignore my statements and say
that it says something about my abilities, but I can build just about anything else....I would consider myself an advanced user.