Hello Inkscape Devels,
First, thank you for your work on Inkscape! It's a really great project that I've been following closely for quite a while now.
This is a message I posted to the Gimp.app forum at http://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=3554123
It concerns Inkscape as well as Gimp.app, and I hope you'll give the idea some consideration. If you have comments, please CC me, as I don't receive normal list mail.
Thanks, -n8
By: Nathan Gray - n8gray Standalone GTK+ v2 installer (or project?) 2006-02-02 01:09 Hi,
First of all, thanks for all the great work you've done building Gimp so the rest of us don't have to!
There are now a number of projects that package a gtk+ application into a "standalone" OS X app. For example, Inkscape and GIMPshop both build standalone OS X apps based on the methods you developed for Gimp.app. The technique of taking all the dependencies and stuffing them into your app bundle is adequate for getting a single app working but it leaves much to be desired when multiple apps are using those same dependencies. You end up with multiple copies of some pretty big libraries lying around taking up space on disk and in memory. In order to minimize this wasted space, support files (like header files) are left out, leading to the current problem where OS X users aren't able to build plugins without descending into the seventh circle of Fink.
As a solution to these problems, I would like to suggest packaging a complete install of gtk+ and its dependencies separately from Gimp.app. It would mean that installing Gimp.app would become a two- step process instead of a one-step process, but the OS X community as a whole would see a tremendous benefit. There are lots of other great gtk+ apps out there that could reach a broad audience on OS X if it was only easier to just install them! The only sensible way to achieve this is if there's a fast, simple way to install gtk+ and its dependencies.
Some of you may be thinking "well what about Fink and DarwinPorts?" The fact is that neither of these is a satisfying solution. The "stable" branch of Fink is terribly out of date and the "unstable" branch (like DarwinPorts) requires hours of building from source to get gtk+ installed. And either solution involves lots of futzing with the command line. If you've come to OS X from linux that seems simple, but for most OS X users it's a major turn-off.
Anyhow, I hope you'll consider this proposal seriously. I honestly believe it could open the door for lots of great gtk+ apps to be ported to standalone OS X apps.
I'm going to post the same message in the Inkscape forum, so maybe both projects can work together.
Thank you, -n8
--
-- Nathaniel Gray -- Caltech Computer Science ------> -- Mojave Project -- http://mojave.cs.caltech.edu -->