Re: Continuing installation difficulties

[Sven Neumann <sven gimp org>]

Hi,

Mark Leisher <mleisher crl nmsu edu> writes:

> I haven't attempted to install any of the newer versions of GTK, so
> I haven't encountered difficulties yet, but I probably will.

what makes you think you will? I'd say that GTK+ installs out of the
box in 99% of all installation attempts. People only run into problems
if they want to install stuff outside the default prefix. And if
people knew a bit about how a UNIX system works and would read the
documentation that comes with the tarball, they would be able to solve
their problems easily.

> My personal opinion is that this was a forced paradigm shift in
> configuration that may make good technical sense, but was premature.
> The technical merits of this move do not clearly address the
> deficiencies of the older procedure.  If they had, I doubt
> compilation and installation problems would be cropping up so
> frequently, because people would grasp the necessary procedure
> changes much quicker.
> 
> The advent of "configure" dramatically simplified compiling and installing.
> That simplicity seems to have disappeared.  Was this really necessary?

I'm following the glib, gtk+ and gimp development for quite a while
now (since 1997 IIRC) and I'd say that installation from source has
never been easier than today. pkg-config made the life much easier for
both developers and users.

Earlier people had to tweak CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS, LDFLAGS, LD_LIBRARY_PATH
and other environment variables or specify akward configure option
that you only ever can get right if you know exactly how to use your
compiler and linker. Nowadays all that people need to do is to install
pkg-config and setup PKG_CONFIG_PATH correctly. Unless the system is
really akward, 'configure ; make ; make install' should work fine
afterwards.

Well, back in the old days when glib was part of gtk+ and gtk+ was
part of gimp, things have probably been easier. But you don't want
that situation back, do you?


Salut, Sven