On Saturday 07 January 2006 08:05 am, Stuart Brorson wrote: > > I think a minimum of 2.4 would be generous, and 2.6 not > > unreasonable.. (2.8.0 came out in August and there are > > pre-2.10 development releases available.)
OK with me (see below) > I gotta disagree about this. GEDA is a desktop app, not a > bleeding-edge kernal developement tool. Therefore it will > be used on all kinds of platforms, some of them fairly old. > It will be used by all kinds of users, many of them not the > least bit interested in anything more than just running the > program to design boards. > > In the real world, there are a lot of older systems out > there. FC1 was released only 2 -- 3 years ago, which is the > blink of an eye in user time. Requiring the user to upgrade > to teh latest distro & version is a turn-off for the many > users who just want to crank out boards. Therefore, I > prefer Ales' approach to support all the way back to GTK-2.2. > That way we pick up RH9 (I believe). But they don't need to upgrade to the latest distro and version. They only need to install the appropriate libraries, and possibly a more recent compiler. If they are building from source, they can build the library from source too. Such an old system may not be a standard distro. It is likely that it has been updated many times, but not in an organized way. Even if it was a standard distro at the beginning you may not recognize it as such now. Besides, nobody in their right mind would want to keep track of all 200 distros. There is a real problem with configure, in that it usually does a bunch of checks it doesn't need, and when it fails, usually by not finding something, the information it gives is not very useful. Unfortunately, this is not one of our tools, just one that we use. The people who use it often unconsciously work around its problems and don't see them. On Monday 09 January 2006 08:52 pm, Ales Hvezda wrote: > ............. what > if there existed a magic collection of gEDA/gaf (and/or more > of the gEDA suite) binaries that actually ran on old versions > of Linux, say all the way back to RH 7.2 and forward to the > most bleeding edge Debian unstable. These magical binaries > are based on the absolutely bleeding edge gtk+, guile, glib, > etc... and will work on even poorly configured systems. My first thought was that will drive you crazy. Second thought was maybe with static linking it might work. Third thought reminds me that you are using guile, so you now need to maintain a dozen static linked variants of guile. I think we need to go back to the essence of free software, or open-source if that is your preference. If you have source you can deal with the issues, and leave it at that. Now if someone could convince the autoconf people that they no longer need to support that 1975 integer only C compiler, maybe it too could improve.
