[Scribus] latest libraries

[Craig Ringer]

On Thu, 2005-02-10 at 07:43 -0800, bart at solozone.com wrote:
> well, Craig "preaches to the converted." I like 9.2 SuSE and am very
> happy I upgraded.
> A full upgrade of kde or gnome IN PLACE is very difficult however.

True. In fact, I think it's a really bad idea unless you know you have
packages made for the purpose or your distro's package management system
can help you out. If you're going to upgrade your desktop environment,
consider doing so using a tool made for the purpose like Konstruct or
Garnome and installing to your home directory.

That said, for Scribus all you really need is a new-ish Qt (the rest of
the dependencies merely need to be non-totally-ancient), which I think
is very reasonable myself. Then again, I guess I think nothing of
compiling apps.

In the end, I do agree that it'd be nice if it was easier to install
binary packages on any distro, etc. However, this isn't a Scribus
specific issue, it's one that applies to most distros and most OSS
software. A proper solution would be good, but in the mean time Scribus
has to rely on package maintainers for specific distro support, or
compiling from source.

If you think this is troublesome, just imagine the screams when the
first Qt4 release (not soon, remember) comes out.

When it comes to the ease of installation on Windows - I agree that's
very handy. On the other hand, it comes with a lot of unseen costs,
including potential incompatibilities between libraries installed by
different apps (so-called "DLL hell") or, as is more common on more
recent Windows apps, a multitude of duplicate libraries taking up disk
space and consuming lots of wasted memory. There's a _reason_ I can run
OpenOffice, FireFox, and Thunderbird on a 64MB 233MHz Linux box if I use
the distro's packages that build against the same gtk, etc. If I try the
same with the stock builds, each loads its own copies of libgtk,
libjpeg, etc etc etc and gobbles a *lot* more memory. Just like on
Windows.

So, I guess there are advantages to how things are now, too. Not that
that is of much comfort when you've just been fighting for hours to get
the @#$@#$ to compile - I remember being there.

What would _really_ rock would be being able to build an SRPM that could
somehow detect if the right libs were present, and instead of failing
use the versions provided with it instead.

You've reminded me of something, though. I should see if I can get
Scribus to build its core dependencies in statically. *that* should be
interesting, and result in a binary the size of the known universe ...
but one that'll run almost anywhere. It works with Acrobat Reader.

-- 
Craig Ringer