[Scribus] Announce 1.2.5 Release

[Peter Linnell]

John R. Culleton wrote:
> On Sunday 16 July 2006 20:31, Christoph Sch?fer wrote:
>> Am Montag, 17. Juli 2006 02:13 schrieb John R. Culleton:
>>> On Sunday 16 July 2006 10:57, John Meyer wrote:
>>>> Plinnell wrote:
>>>>> The Scribus Team is pleased to announce the release of Scribus 1.2.5
>>> With the happy choice of either 1.2.5 or 1.3.3.2, which is to be
>>> preferred?
>> The 1.2.x series is a bit more mature in terms of stability, but is lacking
>> lots of features added in 1.3.3.x. If I were you, I would use both of them.
>>
>>> Are there significant improvements in 1.3.3.2 that
>>> should not be missed?
>> http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/1.3.x_Roadmap#1.3.3
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Christoph
>
> While I was there I took a peek at 1.3.4 and saw some things like
> optical margins that move closer to the familiar TeX world. But I
> saw somethig that gave me pause. There was a time when any Open
> Source program could be compiled from the sources using
> ./configure; make; make install. Now each group is adopting a
> new and unexpected build procedure. We face a new tower of babel.
> Scribus is neat but it isn't my only program. I am reasonably
> sure that 1.3.4 or any other new version can continue to be built
> under make. And all a make procedure does is compile the
> software. I see no compelling reason to change and one big reason
> not to---it puts an extra and for some an unexpected burden of
> downloading and compiling yet another new packaging protocol.
>  

The major gain is developer productivity.  The minor gain is speed for end 
users and much clearer error messages. I personally cannot wait to remove 
autotools from our cvs. Today would not be too soon.

All of us have countless lost hours trying to make sense of build issues and 
config errors when we could be better writing docs or coding. See:

http://rants.scribus.net/2006/05/20/cmake-rocks/

http://rants.scribus.net/2006/05/20/cmake-certainly-does-rock/

http://rants.scribus.net/2006/07/16/a-little-help-from-your-friends/

KDE has already adopted it for KDE 4 and it is already packaged for Suse, 
Gentoo and Debian I think. So, there will be no need to build cmake either, 
even though it is trivial to build and install. There are no dependencies 
except for a C++ compiler and make itself.

It is cross-platform, so one build system for Linux/Unix, MacOSX and Windows.

The only time I've heard Franz swear on IRC was mentioning autotools.

Anyone who wants to continue to maintain the autotool build is welcome, but it 
is not fun ;-)