Re: Outdated dependencies at ftp.gnome.org (was: Makeing librsvg work (bizp2.dll missing))

[Tor Lillqvist <tml iki fi>]

Well, I am not surprised, after all (most of) those dependencies at
ftp.gnome.org were manually built (or slightly repackaged from
packages built by others) by me at random points in history, in my
spare time, without any well-defined process...

If you want something more automated, and hopefully with freshest
possible versions, you could try the cross-compiled Windows packages
in the openSUSE build service maintained by my dear colleague Fridrich
Strba (and to a small extent so far, me too):

  http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/windows:/mingw:/win32/openSUSE_10.3/noarch/

These "noarch" RPMs contain Windows binaries that get installed under
/usr/i686-pc-mingw32/sys-root .

(Repackaging that then from RPMs to ZIP files like the ones currently
on ftp.gnome.org could be mostly trivially automated, and will be done
soonish I think.)

Our hope and plan is that this will eventually supersede the Win32 and
Win64 stuff at ftp.gnome.org as the "official" source of Windows
binaries for the GTK+ and (partial) GNOME stack (and dependencies).

(Yeah, I know Win64 is an incorrect name, but it is short and you know
what I mean, Win32 for AMD64 a.k.a. x86-64.)

Note: I and Fridrich are emplyed by Novell, i.e. the "sponsor" of
openSUSE. I guess I have to point out that over at the Red Hat
-sponsored Fedora project there is also a similar cross-compilation
thing going on. And no doubt sooner or later somebody over in the
Debian world will also start something like this, if they haven't
already. Perhaps also the the KDE people are doing something similar
(but Qt and KDE-oriented, obviously).

> There seams to be no reliable source for third party libraries, GTK+
> depends on, which is compatible with GTK+. With reliable I mean: have
> (at least nearly) up-to-date versions esp. if security fixes are published.

As soon as there is a business case (somebody willing to pay for it),
I am sure there will be companies offering such with some service
level guarantee...

--tml