Re: Help needed pls

[Simon Taylor <simon unisolve com au>]

Jody,

> Build from source !
> Good grief no.  That is not appropriate for novice users.  It is not
> as hard as you might think for a major project, but still not
> something I'd ask my mother to do.

Thanks for your reply, however I beg to differ. I think it's actually quite 
hard for anyone in this (common?) scenario:

* You have a more or less recent Linux distro, (in the case of the
   machines in my office, it's Red Hat 7.1).

* In this case, you do not have a contemporary gnome development 
  environment on your desktop

* You happen to use, (oops), kde as your company desktop

* You discover that gnumeric is the spreadsheet program that you need, but 
  you want to get the latest stable version as the default one on your
  machine is 0.61-9.

* Your distribution vendor (Red Hat) only offers a binary RPM for 0.61-9

* Even rpmfind only offers binary rpms for 0.67-10 for RedHat 7.2

* You suspect that ximian.com might offer a later binary build, but it's not  
  obvious where you can download just the gnumeric package.


Let me stress, this is (now) not a problem for me. I'm a programmer, so I 
built 1.05 by hand. But what do we offer the Linux newcomer who's just 
looking for gnumeric by itself? 

(Maybe the brick wall I am hitting here is that Red Hat builds are old, and 
the Red Hat newcomer just has to put up with it, however I'd welcome any more 
pointers).
 
Regards,

Simon Taylor
-- 
Unisolve Pty Ltd - Melbourne, Australia
+61 3 9568 2005