Re: glib install problems

[Anthony DiSante <orders nodivisions com>]

John Cupitt wrote:
> The gtk-2.4 install was painful since it involved replacing large chunks 
> of my old X with modern versions which can do XRender, xft2, fontconfig 
> and so on. It took about a day of fiddling and in retrospect that day 
> would have been better spent simply buying a newer distro and installing 
> that. In my opinion, installing gtk2 on an old machine is awkward enough 
> to be developer-only.

It's plenty awkward on my "old" Slackware 8/9 system, too.  I've had to 
track down and install 8 different packages in the process, and had to 
google a handful of config/make errors along the way, and I'm currently at 
an impasse with the gtk2 package itself.

> > Slackware doesn't really have a package manager, and I install 
> > everything from source ...
>
>
> I know this is maybe not a helpful thing to say (idiots are always 
> recommending distro switches), but have you considered gentoo? It's a 
> from-source thing, with a good package manager. Just type "emerge gtk2" 
> and everything will be rebuilt and installed for you (though it may take 
> a fair while and a lot of bandwidth).

I tried Debian a few months ago, but was frustrated because the packages 
that were available were never up to date; it seemed only the major 
milestone versions could be installed through the system.  (Gaim and Mozilla 
in particular were weeks or months behind the current release.)  And I still 
had problems with the package-manager itself; it didn't work perfectly, and 
if there's going to be problems, I'd honestly rather just install from 
source and deal with THOSE problems, rather than have to figure out the 
workings of an additional layer of abstraction.

That said though, I haven't tried Gentoo.  Perhaps it's better than Debian's 
apt system.

-Anthony
http://nodivisions.com/
Please reply to the list, not to me, and not to me+list.