Re: why is gtk install so difficult?

["J. Ali Harlow" <ali avrc city ac uk>]

On 2003.10.15 11:12 Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> > From: Ruben Safir Secretary NYLXS [mailto:ruben mrbrklyn com]
> > GTK is only hard to compile and install by hand because the
> > developers have chosen to make it so.
>
> Nobody decided to make anything difficult.

Quite so. A lot of the complexity comes from the fact that Gtk+
depends on so many other libraries. While I think it's unfortunate
that this is the case, I really don't see that the developers
could have made any better choices without sacrificing functionality.

Personally, I've never had any major problems compiling Gtk+ itself
under UNIX, although I have had some problems with the dependcies.
Where I have found it hard is when cross-compiling under mingw32,
but a lot of the problems with this are caused by autohell rather
than Gtk+ itself. It used to be harder, but Owen put a lot of effort
into making it easier (especially glib), for which I'm very grateful.

Perhaps I have a slightly different attitude in that while I am an
open source developer, I also use Gtk+ in my commercial developing
so I'm under no illusions that the Gtk+ team owe me anything.

Cheers,

Ali.