Hi, all,
As one of the guys who was building static packages on FCx, I thought I'd add my $0.02 here. Or 2pf or whatever.
By "static", we only meant that all of the C++ libs were linked statically, including stdc++ itself. This is because different versions of G++ often have different binary interfaces, and we wanted to give the user one less thing to worry about. We added Boehm-GC also since it is small but rare on people's Linux boxes. But if you do 'ldd inkscape' you will see that there are still plenty of libraries upon which Inkscape depends.
You cannot properly link statically with Gtk+, even if you build it statically. Why? Because it loads sub-modules dynamically.
Also, you can't put recent versions of Gtk+ on older versions of X, since it expects certain libs to be available (-lXr is one if i recall correctly).
So, even if a package is delivered as "static", it might still depend on libs that are not present on a given distribution. If I make a static build on FC5, it will likely work on FC4, but not FC3. If I made one on FC4, then maybe. I would expect a build to be upwardly-compatible. Maybe someone wants to make static builds on FC1?
The way to get Inkscape to work on a platform that is not directly supported is, of course, to compile it yourself. For years, I thought that the only way to install new software on a box was to download, unpack, and then do the old dance: ./configure ; make ; make install
Start with Glib, work your way up to Gtkmm. Might take all day. ^^
Hey, it's more work, but it works when all others fail. And that's how it is done. Platforms are supported because there are people who are willing to contribute a little bit of time to fulfill a niche. We still need OpenVMS and Irix .
bob (ishmal)