Re: building gnome-vfs 2.3.1

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Thu, 2003-06-19 at 03:53, James Richardson wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am trying to compile the gnome-vfs package (version 2.3.1) using the
> spec file included; however, according to the spec file, it
> 
> BuildRequires: bonobo-devel >= 2.0.0
> BuildRequires: ORBit-devel >= 2.4.0
> 
> Where on earth can I find these sources? I've looked every and can't
> find them, not even in CVS. ORBit seems to have been decreciated since
> 0.5.x (and replaced by ORBit2 i guess). And I can't find anything but
> bonobo-1.x.

Firstly, caveat emptor. As a general rule, the spec files in tarballs
are not really being maintained. At one point there was a moderately
active GNOME Packaging Project which kept them maintained. Periodically
somebody might fix (for some definition of "fix" that may not be
synonymous with "correctly adjust") the odd spec file, but pick a random
spec file in a random tarball and I would not be surprised to see it
fail.

This seems to be a case in point. If you trace through the dependencies,
gnome-vfs depends only on ORBit2, libbonobo and glib, so those
BuildRequires lines should probably be

BuildRequires: libbonobo-devel >= ...
BuildRequires: ORBit2-devel >= ...

I (and no doubt others) keep meaning to go through and make everything
build correctly via "rpmbuild -tb <tarball>", but there are so many
things to do in life and GNOME and so little time.

If you fix a few things like this, you may wish to file bugzilla reports
including the patch. Some maintainers have expressed active displeasure
at having the spec files in their tarballs, since they have to be
maintained, but I suspect most do not care one way or the other so any
fixes yo umake will be welcome.

Malcolm