Re: GnuCash page on GO site

On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 12:26:38PM -0500, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Charles Goodwin <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> Size doesn't matter.  It's the sheer count that's absolutely
> absurd.  For example, why does libgal exist?
> Why isn't it part of libgtk or libglib?
It was an attempt to create a place for widgets that were not ready
to move into gtk.  It failed and is being replaced by the more
specific libgoffice.

> Same question with pango.. atk..
Welcome to the joy of 'cross desktop compatibility'.  GNOME has
repeatedly tried to write 'neutral' libraries in the hope that they
would be adopted by other projects.  This has not been the glorious
success one would have hoped.

> I agree that adding a dependency that provides a useful feature
> is important, but you also need to make sure that dependency
> is easily accessible to your end users.  I don't expect my users
> to keep up with gnome-CVS.

That is no longer relevant.  As of gnome-2.0 there are strong
api/abi compatibility requirements in place.  Specifying that
gnome-2.2 is installed will get you all of the necessary libraries.
Similarly the adoption of pkg-config has greatly simplified the
livies of developers.

> So, surely you can understand that a hard-to-build application gets
> fewer users, and it's the user-base that makes an application
> worthwhile.

Agreed.  As the developers of apps that sit near the top of the
stack we pay the price for the aggregate complexity of the
underlying stack.  GNUCash was obviously been burned back in the
gnome-1.4 era along with the rest of us.  Have a look at gnome2.x,
it is significantly better and should alay your worries.