Re: Dependencies

On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 17:50, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 07:45:15PM +0100 or thereabouts, Geert Stappers wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 04:29:28PM +0000, Dave Malcolm wrote:
> > > Some questions:  
> > > - What versions of these packages have you got installed?  
> > > - Are you building Conglomerate on top of the GNOME that came with your
> > > distribution, or on top of a locally-built version of some kind?
> > > - What's in the various versions of Debian?
> > Sorry, still didn't find a conclusive answer. [1]
> [...]
> > > - What's other distributions are you using, and what versions of GNOME
> > > do they use?
> 
> The collected wisdom (disclaimer: hyperbole may apply) of #gnome:
> 
> Debian stable has GNOME 1.4
> Debian testing has a mixture of 1.4 and 2.2
> RH 9.0 has GNOME 2.2
> SuSE 9.0 has GNOME 2.2 
> Fedora Core 1 has GNOME 2.4
> Gentoo has GNOME 2.4
> Mandrake 9.2 has GNOME 2.4
> Debian sid has GNOME 2.4

Thanks very much for this list!

>From this it looks like it's safe to require GNOME 2.2 without a great
deal of pain, except perhaps for Fink on Mac OS X (see email on
conglomerate-devel mailing list).

> 
> Not sure about how Ximian Desktop 2 affects any of those. But
> effectively, the latest version of any i386-based Linux distro 
> other than SuSE has 2.4: but _only_ the latest version of that 
> distro. (I say that carefully, because I dunno about FreeBSD
> or Solaris, and someone said that YellowDog had something older.
> And this only works if you count Fedora Core 1 as the latest version
> of RH, too.) So your next question is, "How many people sit on 
> ageing versions because they work fine for them?" :) 

Fair enough.  Though surely if Conglomerate requires more recent
versions of GNOME, that's going to provide people with a good reason to
upgrade :-)

Now that GNOME uses time-based releases, we could have some kind of
statement like "Conglomerate aims to be easy to build on any
distribution up to a year old" (or similar), though really what I want
to do now is avoid pain for existing contributors (and hopefully get a
few more along the way).

> > > - Can we can get away with GNOME 2.2?  
> 
> Looks entirely plausible. 2.4, though...Depends how many people
> really do upgrade immediately.

There are other options, such as requiring GNOME 2.2 for our 0.8
release, and then requiring 2.4 (or later?) for the 1.0 release.  I hope
1.0 will have a big UI cleanup, which would be _much_ easier using the
newer GTK action-based API.

I'm still thinking all of this over, though.

> 
> Also, I confidently expect people to say "No, no, that's wrong"
> for half of those. 
> 
> Telsa
> 
> 
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-- 
David Malcolm
www.conglomerate.org