Re: libglade frustration redux

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

On Mon, 2007-02-19 at 03:38 -0500, Freddie Unpenstein wrote:
> > what you MUST do, is download the tarball and see if the maintainer
> > included any helpfull files to help you understand how to use
> > the library, one of those helpfull files is test-libglade.c, a full
> > fledged example of all the uses of libglade.
[...]
> I personally don't think someone should have to go download the entire source tarball 
> for API documentation, including example use code which IS documentation in its 
> own right, after all.  Especially since glade is pushing the use of libglade as THE
>  way to incorporate glade-produced layouts into applications, libglade should be 
> packaged so as to encourage just that.  Not make it hard for application developers 
> to figure out how to use it.  If it were just some random lib that only a handful 
> of people will ever use, then who cares.  But that's not really the case with libglade.
>
> In any case, this is more an issue for the package maintainer, than the author 
> (assuming, of course, that they're different people).  If the author puts out a tarball
>  of everything, then it's the package maintainers job to divide it up appropriately.

Sure, the maintainer of a package in gnome is typically one who releases
the tarballs containing gnome software, other third parties might go
creating self extracting executable zip files, rpms, debian packages
etc... maybe the world might even converge towards some kind of standard
one day.

Maybe in an ideal world the user of the libglade library (the user that
wants api docs and header files) should have everything presented to 
him by a "distro" and on a silver platter - this is obviously not that
world.

So you can chose a few things to do when your distro doesnt make the
world clear to you:
  - Complain to the distro that they didnt give you what you think
    should have been provided
  - Complain to the community of authors that they should have posted
    more documentation on websites (this typical approach is what I am
    complaining about myself...)
  - Be resourcefull and get the package from the authors directly so
    you know what really comes with the whole package, not what "someone
    said" the package should include or whatever joe blow decided to
    distribute.

Surely we can agree that theres no point in asking the maintainers
of the tarball to please give better documentation and examples, if
you've never even looked at the tarball right ?

Cheers,
                      -Tristan