donn wrote:
c. Some discussion relating to my last question about inkspace vs Firefox/Thunderbird
It would be a large package. :-) The autopackage attempts this in part, but only collects the rarest deps, but until I am successful, it is not an option. This also relates to your comments about windows. The windows package works because we ship it with the very latest versions of all of the dependencies.
This sounds amazing to me - that it's harder to find *all* the deps for Linux than it is for Windows. Is it simply because you are new to the game or is it something Linuxy?
Not at all, it is more of a reaction. Finding and building all these libs on windows is much much more difficult and time consuming. Add that to the fact that windows lacks a good package manager like can be found in any linux distro. Inkscape has made it a priority to give those interested in building on windows the easiest time possible. (In hopes that we could attract more win32 developers because a large portion of our user base ins win32 but only a very small portion of our developer base.) Thanks to the hard work of Bob Jamison in collecting the packages we have a wonderful situation. A windows developer requires only three (rather large) downloads to compile inkscape.
Package managers like apt have made it very simple to find and install dependencies on linux for a long time now. If you are having difficulties file a bug against your distro.
I mean, if the guys who actually code inkscape cannot determine the exact list of dependencies it needs then how the heck can anyone else? :D
That is ridiculous. This isn't the situation at all. We are fully aware of the dependencies. (You should probably not risk offending people with comments like this if you would like assistance. ;-) )
The Inkscape project tries as much as possible not to leave users behind, but there come times when we must move forward and require newer versions of our dependencies. A larger problem is that we have no active participants running Core 3. So it receives no testing.
I wonder what users of inkscape use what distros? You should run a poll or something. Still, I'm game to test things and report.
I think that is a great idea. I'd really like to have user polls on the front page of the website.
As I mentioned before, we have supplied semistatic packages before with much success. All of the packages available on our site are there because someone volunteered to create them. No one has volunteered to create RPMs for Fedora Core 3.
Aaron Spike