Sven Neumann wrote: > You are making a wrong assumption here about the target audience of a > source release. Users are not the target audience. Users should grab a > pre-compiled binary from their distributor or from someone who knows > what he's doing and provides one for them. I consider myself belonging to the target audience. And I'm just a user. Who else shall fetch source code releases ? Developers go straight for the CVS repository anyway.
There are more people in this thread who state to be just a user and do install source code releases. When you browse through the threads of the gimp-user list, there are also discussions about 2.3.x topics which is available as source code only. I do install Gimp source releases - on top of my favorite distribution 'cause it contains bug fixes I don't get quickly from the vendor. Or I like the latest Gimp but the distribution is not maintained anymore and I don't want to upgrade. Or I want to try brand-new features, e.g. the object extraction via Siox, etc. All the stuff which is not offered by an official distribution. I could imagine more use cases like this. > The target audience of a source code release are people who are > experienced in building software from source. They do appreciate the > standard autoconf/automake based build and install procedures that GIMP > provides. They would hate us if we deviated from this standard build > process and started to install wrapper scripts. I'm sorry but why should they hate you ? They need the wrapper anyway as pointed out in the release notes. There are several other source code releases who provide wrappers to make sure that the application runs of the box after installation. They provide additional checks about the environment, check permissions, make sure that they access the right libraries to avoid unnecessary user confusion. Examples are Firefox, Thunderbird, the Wine applications, Tomboy, Beagle (in fact all Mono applications), etc. .... It does not break the mechanism of "configure && make && make install" as everything could be embedded fully transparent within this procedure, even the installation of a wrapper. The user even wouldn't notice. Kind regards, Stephan. _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list Gimp-user@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
