Re: why is gtk install so difficult?

[Michael Torrie <torriem chem byu edu>]

On Tue, 2003-10-21 at 20:46, Ruben Safir Secretary NYLXS wrote:
> > 
> > /usr/lib, /usr/local/lib, $(PREFIX), $LDFLAGS, anything nonstandard in
> > /etc/ld.so.conf on Linux... and that's just for libraries, not includes.
> > The cure is worse than the disease.
> > 
> 
> I disagree.  The cure is the cure.  And /etc/ld.so.conf is easy enough to
> cat, is it not?
> 

It still won't solve much.  I can imagine the outcry from users taking
their program and trying to run it on another machine, which doesn't
look in /opt.  Better to stick with standards and let the users and
developers who know how to do it set their LD_LIBRARY_PATH (for example
garnome).

> 
> 
> And this statement is a a statement of acceptence of incompetency and negligence
> which has plagued gnome for a LONG LONG time.  The ability to upgrade the sources
> through a constitant use of defaults for autoconf is ESSENTIAL to the long term
> usage of any large software package in which the user is to become dependent on.

I take extreme exception to this statement.  Owen, Havoc, Sven and
others are billiant and exceptional people and developers.  They know
their stuff.  Owen and Havoc in particular have spent a lot of work on
usability (in the UI and in the code) and have made GTK an incredible
and powerful library.  Although RedHat funds GTK development, this
library is given to the community at no charge.  You are free to build
you own libraries and make them easier to compile.  But I really doubt
that things could be made much simpler.   I'll grant you autoconf is
limited and we do need a better build system, but within the rules that
we've outlined here, GTK really is a matter of ./configure, make, make
install, as long as you understand how to mix existing binary libraries
with your new ones.

The problem Tara is having seems to be that only the glib and gtk
libraries are being compiled from source (so the e-mail says). 
Apparently atk and pango (how she (he?) compiled pango without some pain
on rh6.2 is beyond me without having to get freetype and xft also) were
installed in some binary form (rpm --nodeps, most likely).  As a side
note,  I am attempting to build gtk2 on rh6.2 but I am already having
problems getting pkg-config to build.  There appears to be some
limitations in the libtool that ships with rh62 that prevent it from
compiling.  I don't see how this situation could be easily resolved and
"made easier;" GTK2 expects newer build tools that rh62 came with.

> 
> 
> Ruben
-- 
Michael Torrie <torriem chem byu edu>