[Shotwell] Released: Shotwell 0.8.1 - a GNOME Photo Manager

[Adam Dingle]

David,

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 7:54 PM, David Velazquez <
david.velazquez08 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all, is there any word on building Shotwell .8.x for Lucid on the PPA?
> In
> a previous message Adam said this would be done after vacation but the PPA
> still appears to have .7 in it. No rush on this if there are still plans to
> do it, but if support for Lucid has already been dropped I'd be interested
> in official word so I can get on building it from source.
>

I apologize for the confusion about this.  The Yorba PPA will not include
Shotwell 0.8.x for Lucid.  As you pointed out, back on December 28 I did say
that we would add 0.8.x for Lucid to the PPA, but I had not yet talked to
the team about why it was left out from the release (we were all on vacation
at the time).  It turns out that for technical reasons we can't easily
support 0.8.x for Lucid in our PPA.  The problem is that Shotwell 0.8 won't
build either with Vala 0.8 (the version included in Lucid) or Vala 0.11 (the
version available in the Vala PPA).  It requires Vala 0.10.  The PPA build
system works in such a way that we could easily either use Vala from the
target release (i.e. 0.8) or from an external PPA (i.e. 0.11), but other
versions are not easily available to us.

I should have announced this more clearly on this mailing list previously.
Fortunately, it's not hard to build 0.8 from source for Lucid, and if you
run into trouble doing that we're happy to help on this list.

On a separate, but related note, how long do you predict being able to
> support Ubuntu releases via the PPA? If Lucid support has been dropped a
> mere 8 months into its release will Maverick be treated similarly?
>

In the future, it's our goal that every Shotwell release will support both
the current Ubuntu release and the previous release, both for building from
source and in our PPA.  This means that you'll be able to install 0.9 in
binary form on either Maverick (from our PPA) or on Natty (which we expect
will itself include Shotwell 0.9).  To be able to do that, we need Shotwell
to be able to build with the latest Vala (we're working on that), or
alternately we could distribute generated .c files rather than the original
.vala files in our source package (just like Vala itself does), which would
remove the build-time dependency on any particular version of Vala.  In any
case, we'll find a way to do better next time.  :)

adam