On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 04:22:12PM +0200, donn wrote:
FC3 was released in November 2004 and in January 2006 was transfered to Fedora Legacy, entering in maintenance mode, where only security and critical bug fixes are expected. Sad but true, is expected to have problems running bleeding edge software on it. On a related note, RHEL 4 is based on FC3, and neither on it one can't install Inkscape 0.44 (it may be possible to install 0.44.1)
Thanks for the info. I am mostly aware of this, and that is why I am on this line of enquiry.
If a static version (which would be what goes into the autopackage + some extra stuff, seems like libpng and libstdc++) could go into a tar.gz - perhaps inscape would run on my old dog of a distro.
Perhaps I'm not alone in this need? Not everyone can keep pace with the 6 monthly releases you know!
I suspect generally we would anticipate that people who wish to avoid frequent upgrade cycles, would also be avoiding frequent upgrades to the latest versions of Inkscape as they come out. Similarly, it seems logical that people who wish to stay on the bleeding edge of a software project like Inkscape, would similarly be open to staying with fairly recent distros.
But the way Inkscape (or any open source project, really) works, is by people wishing to "scratch an itch". In other words, the project is strongest when many people with differing motivations cooperate. We've not had people with an itch to make inkscape work on older distros, so it is not too surprising to see that there are some issues with that. Thus, in theory you could help improve Inkscape by not giving in to the temptation to upgrade your distro, and instead focus on figuring out how to create a tarball package of Inkscape that works on FC3. It sounds like RHEL4 is based on FC3, so you could probably imagine your efforts would have fairly wide payoff.
If you do decide to go with the distro upgrade thing, and the idea of major upgrades every 6 months seems annoying, you might want to take a look at Debian or Ubuntu, because they have a somewhat different upgrade approach that makes it much easier to "upgrade as you go".
Bryce