Re: [gtk-osx-users] why not just build binary files for downloading ?

[John Ralls <jralls ceridwen us>]

On Oct 28, 2011, at 9:15 AM, 郭嘉(Guo Jia) wrote:

> Hi , for the dev group members, thanks for your efforts, I am not to be critical on the jhbuild scripts, 
> 
>  but as everyone would have struggled to build the gtk-osx binaries, why not just provide the files as packages?
> 
>  It seems that there are only PPC , X86 and X64 binaries should be built, and only 4 systems (Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard, Lion) should be noticed.
>  I think storage space is not the problem, may the unexpectable (it may fail here or there..) building scripts be the matter? 
>  If the group is short-handed, I would maintain a Lion X64 branch. 

The "group" is one. Me. I have a months-long backlog of work here, on Gtk quartz, and on Gnucash. A more significant problem is that providing binaries for, say, meta-gtk-osx-bootstrap and meta-gtk-osx-core, about 30 libraries, won't support anything beyond the most trivial application... but the rest of the dependencies need to be built into the same tree with the same compiler settings, so anyone building an application has to get the build system working anyway.

Remember also that the intent of this project is that an application team will use the tools here to create a stand-alone application bundle which they can distribute in binary form, as I do for Gnucash and Gramps, and quite a few other developers do for their products.

As for Lion: Unfortunately, Apple has decided that the older SDKs (10.4 and 10.5) won't be supported on Lion, so using a Lion machine for building isn't useful unless the application team decides not to support those older platforms. It's the Gtk team's policy to leave that choice to application teams, so any official binaries would have to support Tiger and Snow Leopard.

Regards,
John Ralls