I was gathering details to update the legacy gnome-2 packages I care about when I realised that I've built them with other newer packages in the infrastructure (e.g. GConf-3 instad of -2) and I have no confidence that the old versions in the book will be usable.
When Wayne mentioned his version of the book, containing gnome-3, there seemed to be general approval that it was the way to go, even in its current incomplete state (missing package descriptions, command explanations, and sometimes sizes and timings). I don't use gnome itself, but I have to build a lot of gnome packages to get to the few parts I use (as well as abiword and gnumeric, I use epiphany and epiphany-extensions, yelp, gcalctool, gucharmap). Until this build I've used totem, but now that totem uses clutter it can no longer play videos on my old hardware. So, I still have *some* interest in the book's gnome packages being up-to-date. Looking at Wayne's book, the longer anyone waits before merging it, the bigger the task will be, so I'm offering to merge it. What I'm proposing to do is to add a new area called 'Deprecated Gnome Packages' situated after the gnome utilities, with an intro noting these packages can be used by various applications but will eventually be redundant when new versions of those applications appear. Here will be ORBit2, libbonobo, libgnome, libgnomecanvas, libbonoboui, gnome-vfs, libgnomeui. That is approximately what Wayne suggested. Arguably, libIDL could be moved here at a later date. A change is that I'll move gnome-media (an application) into multimedia/audioutils and extend its text: it can be used as a volume control but is now deprecated. I'll suggest that anyone using it for a volume control who doesn't build a full gnome desktop may wish to look at external packages - volumecontrol (gtk+-2) or gvolwheel (0.7 for gtk+-2, 0.9 or later for gtk+-3). For the moment, I won't mention pavucontrol (for Pulse) because I failed to get Pulse working and haven't looked at the (long string of) dependencies for pavucontrol. After that, I'll merge the bulk of Wayne's book. Some parts have already been overtaken by updates to the book, and anyway I'm diffing against my working copy so all the .svn files are showing as deleted. This means I've got to go through the diffs and cut them down to only the wanted parts. I don't think it will be practical for me to move packages to different places, so they will go where Wayne has put them even if people want to suggest occasional packages could be put elsewhere (to me, a lot of the non-gnome packages look as if they will be gnome-specific). I'm still reviewing the diffs for the gnome packages themselves, but I've looked at all the changes for the rest of the book. I had hoped to be able to update a chapter or area at a time, but that is unlikely to work - too much will fail to render because of broken links. So, the only practical approach, IMO, is to do everything together. Because I'm retaining the legacy gnome packages mentioned above, I have no need to comment out the links to them from other packages as Wayne had to. Similarly, I won't touch the packages such as galeon which are already commented. There are a number of additional packages which might be contentious, as well as a few other points to discuss (if this approach is agreeable), so I'll reply to this post with a list of the packages to be added in the non-gnome parts of the book, and again with a list of issues and points to discuss. If this suggestion meets with approval, after the merge is done I'll (a) update the legacy packages, (b) tag those packages I know build with LFS-7.0, (c) start a fresh build where I attempt to get through most of the basics of gnome (Libraries, Shell, Extras, Utilities, Shell Fallback, and (perhaps) OS Services) so that I can firm up the measurements and (hopefully) add descriptions and explanations - unless anyone else is building gnome. I'm doubtful if I'll like the result, but it seems to me that the book needs to move forward and I'd hate to see Wayne's work wasted. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
