On Jul 6, 2006, at 8:08 AM, Ben Fowler wrote:
On 25/06/06, Jon A. Cruz <jon@...18...> wrote:
On Jun 25, 2006, at 12:31 AM, Ralf Stephan wrote:
Oh, another driving platform as far as I'm concerned would be OS X. That's my main OS at the moment, so I have ulterior motives for keeping it build-able there. :-) At the moment, fink is only up to GTK+ 2.6.10. http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/gtk+2
Now.... if some people were to help getting native GTK+ working well on OS X, then that would free at least that particular dependency. It *might* be practical for a 0.46 timeframe, but not 0.45 (though good enough for devs might be doable in that timeframe).
Jon, I'm sorry that I missed this when you originally posted in this thread, you are of course 100% correct, unfortunately so is every other comment: I don't see a single path forward that will work for everyone, and we are probably left with Bryce's original proposal that the time has come to move on regardless of 'pain'. Long term planning is not often a vital part of FLOSS development, but minimising the effort required today, for today's work is. Even so, I would agree that GTK 2.10 and native would be a good goal for 0.46; Apart from supporting you, I would suggest progressively up-rating the requirements as per Ralf's post - people who are using the latest versions of Inkscape cannot but be aware of the need for Inkscape to have near contemporary (stable) UI libraries.
For Mac OS X, perhaps we ought to concentrate on
- Delivering Universal Binaries
- Creating an XCode or Project Builder project
- Native GTK+
To my mind this is roughtly in order of importance to users, and so it must be noted that the first on this list likely depends on the second which ought therefore to have priority.
...
Hi Ben & Ralf, I have a little bit of experience now with the build process and Native GTK+, so I thought I'd interject with a couple of comments.
It's my experience that an XCode project isn't going to be *required* to generate universal binaries, but that bypassing the automake dependency will both create a little pain and avoid a little pain in building the application itself. However, I'm not aware of the number of people using OpenDarwin, which doesn't have all of the libraries present on Mac OS X. So before moving the Mac OS X build process to proprietary tools and libs, it's worth considering whether you'd want to leave a target in place for OpenDarwin users that allows them to build Inkscape for a darwin platform using GTK+/X11 and GNU tools. The nice thing about XCode is that it allows you to take half- measures in adopting the Apple toolset.
On the first two points a 0.45 timeframe is a piece of cake. On the third, I agree with Ralf. I'm unsure how ambitious a 0.46 timeframe is for the native GTK+ libraries. The last time I built and looked at them (in April), there were pretty significant performance and reliability problems. That said, I'm really interested in working on them.
--David H