Subject: Re: libglade summary
From: Aaron Lehmann (aaronl@vitelus.com)
Date: Sat Feb 10 2001 - 16:06:57 CST
[not a flame]
On Sat, Feb 10, 2001 at 04:14:19PM +0100, Joaqu?n Cuenca Abela wrote:
> 1. It depends in gnome
>
> False. It's only that the packagers seems to have little interest
> building libglade with the --without-gnome configure option. We can
> provide binaries of libglade compiled with gnome support turned off.
Yeah, it's a bit strange that debian offers packages called
libglade0-dev and libglade-gnome0-dev but they both depend on Gnome.
I just filed a bug.
> 2. It depends in libxml-1, and depending in expat & libxml-1 or
> libxml-1 & libxml-2 is a very bad idea
>
> True (the first part) and (partially) false (the second one).
>
> We're not in windows. We can have in the same system two different
> versions of the same library without any problem. The only conflict
> between libxml1 & libxml2 was that their -dev packages both included a
> little xml-config script. Now this problem is solved, because libxml2
> has changed this script to xml2-config.
It's not that it won't work (although that IS true in the current
versions available in Debian), but more that it's incredibly silly to
depend on two different versions of the same XML livrary and have them
both in RAM at the same time. Perhaps it would be better if you
patched libglade to use libxml2 (it shouldn't be very hard), bringing
it up to date, and sent the patches to the maintainer. I really do not
see why people are not standardizing on libxml2.
> 4. It requires gettext to do i18n, and we don't support gettext
>
> True.
Actually this is more of a bug with us, as we should be using gettext
too. It would make a lot more sense if we used gettext in the first
place, and then this would be a non-issue. The only problem is the
conversion is non-trivial.
> 5. It introduces a new dependencie (besides the libxml problem)
>
> True. That's the point.
No comment. I'm not sure the church secratary wants to make sure that
many prerequisites are installed. My thoughts are that it's good to be
independent, and we've succeeded in doing this so far even in ways
that I'm not happy about. For example, we support many platforms
independently of any external abstraction library.
> ===========================================================
>
> So, to me, the real problems are libxml1 and gettext (as soon as Kevin
> says that it compiles ok).
> To gain gettext support should be pretty simple, and libglade is not the
> main raison (gettext is good, I explained its advantages long ago in a
> lengthy mail). The main problem to gain gettext support is that we
> don't have autoconf/automake support and I'm not a makefile's guru.
Convert AbiWord to gettext and it will redeem you for the glade commit
(as long as it's supported on all of the platforms; I can imagine
Thomas getting peeved).
> The libxml1 problem is a bit tricky... a solution may be to port
> libglade to expat & libxml2... suggestions?
I think most of us prefer to avoid using libglade at all in the main
tree, but if you're trying to compromize then porting libglade to
libxml2 would be a good start. I've heard that gnome is trying to
standardize on libxml2 so even for them this would be a step in the
right direction.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat Feb 10 2001 - 16:07:18 CST