[Scribus] Re: Mac & Windows Users

[Craig Ringer]

On Mon, 2005-04-11 at 17:22 +1000, Martin Costabel wrote:

> So I'll just wait for the release of 1.2.2 and then put a Fink package 
> together (using X11, of course) where I'll try to use some of your ideas 
> for reducing the number of patch hacks or at least their hackishness.

I wouldn't worry too much about changing your build scripts. If they
work fine now, there are probably better things to spend time on. Some
of them won't be necessary for 1.3.x anyway, when that's production
quality, so you'd be throwing some of the work away eventually anyway.

> As for the non-X11 build, I think the corresponding patches have not 
> been backported to 1.2.x and at least I have not tried to compile 1.2.x 
> with Qt/Mac.

I think I applied a couple of fixes to 1.2.x, but mostly tried to stay
away from modifying it since it's the "stable" tree. Not much will have
changed.

> Also I am not sure if releasing an app bundle too early 
> wouldn't be rather harmful.

Yep. That's why I haven't exactly been leaping to release .app bundles
yet - (a) my current bundles are nearly 100MB, and (b) they're slow,
buggy, and horrible.

If any of us ever cobble together a preview-quality build, I'd be
inclined to label it with "pre-alpha port", "this will crash and eat all
your documents", etc rather liberally. The MacOS/X stuff is early days
yet.

> Right now, if Scribus is slow on the Mac, or 
> if there are little quirks with fonts, people can always blame it on X11 
> for the Mac or on Fink

Both of which they seem disturbingly willing to do. I guess Apple's
half-hearted integration of X11 support doesn't help.

> but if you release an app bundle and it is still 
> slow, or if the Aqua buttons don't fit into their boxes or there are 
> bugs with scrolling (all of which is the case for 1.3x with Aqua), it 
> will fall back squarely onto Scribus itself and give it a bad press. 
> More polishing of the Aqua side is certainly necessary.

I couldn't agree more. Finding the time for said polishing, though...

--
Craig Ringer