Re: libglade frustration

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Tue, 2007-02-13 at 14:03 -0700, Michael Torrie wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-02-13 at 15:12 -0500, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> > Somehow I think that downloading the actual tarball from wherever the
> > website of a said software said to go download it from is much more
> > obvious a place then in a "-devel" package, that may or may not be
> > available for whatever your distribution flavor of the month happens
> > to be.
>
> You're right.  FC6 decided to package gtk-demo with the main gtk2 rpm.
> If there was a similar program to gtk-demo for libglade I'm sure they'd
> put it in libglade2 also.  In any event, if a user wants to develop with
> libglade, he'd need to install the rpms or debs or whatever.  Most users
> aren't going to be using the raw tarballs.
>
> The problem with the raw tarballs is that they cause would-be users a
> lot of grief.  I and many others on the list no longer recommend that
> new developers compile and install the various parts of gtk from
> tarballs.  Without the proper understanding of the prefix, the
> pkg_config environment variable, and the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, users end up
> with completely broken systems.

Sure, people dont generally use lfs as thier chosen distro, the tarball
is also probably something you dont want to go just installing in any
old prefix, but when it comes to looking at the package that was
provided by the developers and maintainers of a said software, you
download the tarball and look, at least thats what I do.

Lets put a different spin on it, is it fair to blame the maintainers
of a module for not providing information that was in fact included
in thier tarball ? 

if people dont think thats fair, then why wouldnt they just look
in the tarball ?

> From that perspective, considering that we are speaking of a user
base of developers that probably have experience dealing with 
third party software packages, I find it stunning that people dont 
just run an 'ls' in the package root.

[...]
> Agreed.  Perhaps when GTK includes the libglade stuff in the version 3.x
> releases, gtk-demo can be partially rewritten to be use some glade files
> and thus have a ready example of using the gladexml calls.

The builder documentation will be a part of gtk+ ofcourse, that will
be better.

Cheers,
                    -Tristan