Re: stuck while installing GTK+ ,,, need help

[Tor Lillqvist <tml iki fi>]

Richard Boaz writes:
 > If you find it unacceptable to mail you directly with this, fine,
 > just let me know and I'll post directly there.

It's acceptable, but I don't mind getting flamed publicly if the
consensus indeed is that my message was rude... So I'm sending this
reply to the list.

 > If Sergei has solved this problem, why has nobody involved with GTK+  
 > bothered to look to his solution and see if something can be  
 > extracted therefrom that can be folded back into the GTK+  
 > installation itself?

Probably because he hasn't submitted any patch suggestions etc through
the proper channels, i.e. bugzilla? (Or has he?) Anyway, I doubt many
GTK+ maintainers read this list, or at least, they don't seem to take
part in the dicsussions here.

And actually, is there anything to fold back? As far as I understand,
without actually trying them (I only browsed the README), Sergei's
tool is a layer *on top of* the stock GTK+ etc build mechanisms. His
tool automates downloading of tarballs, invoking configure scripts
with proper arguments, and running make and make install, right? Does
he provide any patches to the stock tarball contents, I don't know? So
his tool is more like an alternative to a Linux distro's source
packages than an alternative to the individual source module's build
mechanism.

As such, his tool might indeed then be very useful to people who run
some proprietary UNIX release that doesn't provide the latest and
greatest of GTK+ etc. On the other hand, at least the more popular
UNIXes already have their own established "freeware" packaging and
distribution channels.

Anyway, as I said, I don't mind if he briefly advertises his solution
in his posts as long as he writes something relevant to the message
he's replying to, too.

 > I find it much more annoying to continually see the same
 > installation problems over and over and over, that simply go on
 > unaddressed by the GTK+ team.

If the same problems indeed repeat themselves, has anybody reported
them in bugzilla? And perhaps even provided suggested patches?

 > While we're on good ideas, why not make GTK+ installation more  
 > successful, thus rendering Sergei's tool obsolete; that would make  
 > him disappear, no?

Please submit specific bug reports to bugzilla. (Note that "I don't
really know what I am doing and have mixed up everything and can't get
anything to work" is not something GTK+ maintainers can do anything
about.)

--tml