Michael Robinson wrote: >Why is Lua changing anyways? Unfortunately, a lot of Open Source software is constantly changing (in ways that aren't backward compatible). In many cases, if you see a large jump in version numbers that means a major modification has taken place and compatibility is not guaranteed. You can easily get into topics on what's more important, technological advancement and improvement or backward compatibility and needing to support legacy code/uses. My personal opinion is that in most cases if a design can't maintain at least some backward compatibility, someone didn't do a good forward thinking design in the first place. However, I'm sure there are many members of the Open Source community who would disagree.
> Lua wasn't listed as a dependency for gnome, so I'm guessing that going without it won't have a significant impact on gnome functionality wise. I first ran across software using Lua when I started using SciTE (a very flexible programming editor). Lua is a programming language that can be used as an embedded language in applications. It can be used for writing scripts that help customize an application. I can't see how an embedded language would be a required prerequisite for desktop software, but then I don't use Gnome. So, I'm not that familiar with it. I am having similar backward compatibility problems with other libraries. Fox Toolkit version 1.7 adds some internationalization support. However, most of the applications that run on it are designed for 1.6 and may not necessarily run on 1.7. Not sure whether to try to get things working on 1.7 (not going too well so far) or go back to 1.6. Anyone else using Fox Toolkit for anything? FLTK is getting better fortunately. They had a lot of versions split off and many were completely incompatible. Version 1.3 is working toward unifying a lot of those splits and getting more applications working with it. SDL also has more than one development line each with different licensing and functionality. Most programs I've run across still use the SDL 1.2 line. However, there's also 2.0 (was 1.3). Since, you're working on Gnome, you're probably more familiar with GTK. A few lightweight distributions are still using GTK+ (the version 1 line). Most distributions have switched to 2. However, I've seen a lot of complaints from users interested in efficiency on their machines that the code is bloated. There are some compatibility switches for attempting to build GTK+ 1 applications with GTK+ 2. Developers and distributions are now moving to GTK+ 3. Some projects are starting to add in support for moving to that version because most GTK programs won't work as is with the new version of GTK+ 3. With libpng, I've had to make a few minor modifications to most applications that need it in order to deal with changes made in later versions of that library. Having similar problems with applications that use libfribidi. Again there are two development lines. I'm currently looking at the code for sdcv (which worked with some patching with later versions of GTK+ 2). Don't know if it'll work with GTK+ 3 at all. I'm going in and recoding it and removing all the GTK dependencies so they won't be an issue for me. I could keep going with other libraries, but I'll stop here. So, this kind of thing happens all the time. Typically, I try to keep up with latest versions. However, what can one do when most of the Open Source applications only work with earlier versions of a library? The only way to ensure a library doesn't change too much is work with developers who care about backward compatibility, use tools that are no longer updated (however, if they have major dependencies you have the same issue only worse), minimize dependencies as much as possible or write it yourself. The last option guarantees backward compatibility if you want it and I personally use that option sometimes. Would be very interested to hear what others do about these types of issues. Sincerely, Laura http://www.distasis.com/cpp -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
