---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 19:01:37 -0500 From: Jonadab the Unsightly One <jonadab@...581...> To: clipart@...330... Subject: Re: [Clipart] Announcing Inkscape 0.40 Release
Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...> writes:
user's may encounter more trouble getting Inkscape installed on some platforms than in previous releases. To help those who run into this issue, we're also providing 'Static Binary' packages that include these new libraries inside the package, and thus, the static releases are very large.
Very large? 8 Megs hasn't been a large size for an application download in *years*. There are *plugins* nearly twice that large. (For example, I've got a copy of j2re-1_4_2_05-linux-i586.rpm sitting around in my downloads directory weighing in at 14MB, and nobody apologised for that being large.)
Honestly, I wish more applications would realease statically linked binaries like this.
<rant intensity="50%"> However, I still have to chase down a dependency: gtk2. I have gtk2, of course, but apparently it's not the latest and greatest version. So I downloaded that, but now I need other stuff...
error: Failed dependencies: libglib2.0 >= 2.4.0 is needed by libgtk+2.0_0-2.4.9-9mdk libpango1.0 >= 1.4.0 is needed by libgtk+2.0_0-2.4.9-9mdk libgtk+-x11-2.0_0 = 2.4.9-9mdk is needed by libgtk+2.0_0-2.4.9-9mdk
I need to do this anyway, since there's a new Gimp coming out that I'll want, but this underscores the single largest problem IMO in open-source today: excessive use of dynamic linking makes upgrades painful beyond the bounds of all reason.
I can understand the desire to link inkscape dynamically against GTK, because *lots* of stuff links against GTK, and it makes sense to install one copy (of each major version).
But I do NOT understand why GTK is linked dynamically against libglib and pango. Virtually nothing else besides GTK uses those libraries, so there's no good reason for the dynamic linking:
root@...582... ~/download :) # rpm -q --whatrequires libpango1.0 libgtk+2.0_0-2.2.4-2mdk root@...582... ~/download :) # rpm -q --whatrequires libglib2.0 libgtk+2.0_0-2.2.4-2mdk libgtop2.0_0-2.0.5-1mdk root@...582... ~/download :) # rpm -q --whatrequires libgtk+-x11-2.0_0 gtk+2.0-2.2.4-2mdk libgtk+2.0_0-devel-2.2.4-2mdk root@...582... ~/download :) #
Not only is GTK quite pointlessly dynamically linked against libglib and pango, but it *itself* is subdivided into two packages, for absolutely no good reason.
This is why I only have time to upgrade stuff at home, and at work I'm still using Gnome 1.4 -- at work, I can't justify the time to chase down a hillion jillion dependencies. I shouldn't have to do it at home either. Nobody should. Hard drive sizes being what they are, it no longer makes sense to save a couple of measley megabytes by inflicting superfluous pain on the user. Inkscape is an application I use with some frequency: as such, it's welcome to a few megabytes of drive space. </rant>
One can only imagine the trouble I'd have put myself through if I'd downloaded the non-statically-linked version of Inkscape. <<shudder>>
The take-home message is this: Static linking is GOOD, and the world needs more of it.