Re: Continuing installation difficulties

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

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.
> 
> I just wanted to get people's opinion on why the continuing configuration
> difficulties persist.
> 
> 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 really don't understand this "paradigm shift" that you are talking
about.

The only real changes from GTK+-1.2 to GTK+-2.0 are:

 - the use of PKG_CONFIG_PATH, instead of finding glib-config, 
   gtk-config in $PATH.
 - the increased number of packages and dependencies

The first does add one more environment variable to set, but
probably makes clearer what is actually going on; I certainly
don't see it as a fundemental change.

There is no doubt that GTK+-2.0.x is harder to build than
GTK+-1.2, but I don't think people are having significantly
more trouble with it; there's been lots of compilation questions
really since this list was started. I think the guide at:

 http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/gtk-building.html

is helping. (Maybe we should split the "extra configuration options"
part of that page off to make it less scary.)

The only real way to reduce compilation problems in my opinion
is to reduce the number of people who are trying to compile
the software by making it easy for them to find prebuilt
packages.

Regards,
                                        Owen