installation rant (ignore if in bad mood)

[Daniel Fetchinson <fetchinson googlemail com>]

<rant on>

Folks, this will be another rant about general user experience.

I consider myself computer literate so compiling from source is never
a problem as long as ./configure; make; make install works. If not, I
consider the software crappy. I tried installing the latest sawfish
bundle, in this order:

librep 0.90.3
rep-gtk 0.90.0
sawfish 1.5.3

First I wanted to install to a custom location using --prefix but that
didn't work, see the other recent thread I started. So I thought,
okay, let's not give sawfish developers a hard time, let's just
install to the default locations. So I did

./configure
make
make install

on librep. All good. Then to rep-gtk: ./configure fails with

checking for LIBREP... no
configure: error: can not locate librep

What?? Even if everything is installed to the default location
configure can't find it. Why?

Guys, I really love sawfish, but recently the quality of released code
really is going down. If I can't install something with configure,
make, make install, in even the *simplest* possible circumstances,
then there is something wrong.

</rant off>

Cheers,
Daniel


-- 
Psss, psss, put it down! - http://www.cafepress.com/putitdown