Re: why is gtk install so difficult?

[Ruben Safir Secretary NYLXS <ruben mrbrklyn com>]

> 
> locate is a bad choice - if the bozo has installed glib or something wrong, and

locate can be tried first, after looking at the timestamp

> 
> If you're so unsure about its location that you're resorting to 'find', you
> just bought yourself a 'find /'.  Yes, over *all* the file systems.  

Not really.  You just need to check /opt /usr/include and /lib

While find is a HOG, you are only perhaps doing this once, writing results
to a file in /tmp which can be timestamped for future installed system.

BTW - I also agree that finding the wrong libraries is a problem, which is
why the first thing the ./configure script needs to do is to take a hard look
at the system and determine what is there.  If your using a system for a long
time and have loaded ximian, helix and distro RPM's, it is very likely to
have multiple libraries installed.  We're not really reinventing the wheel here.
This is problems Unix and C have needed to contend with for years.  The proper
usage of autoconf, make, find, locate, ld and even RCS are designed to make this
work.  

When these problems of worng libraries etc occur, they screw up gnonf as much as
they would the standard tool set.

Your not going to get 100%, but your going to do much better than the current 
state of gnome and gtk software installation, especially on a standard Linux
kernel based x86 system.

I've never gotten balsa to compile with the spell libraries by hand since it's
ealiest releases.  And while I'm not Miguel, I'm far from a newbie at both
writing code and administrating systems.

With make, you can even go and fetch a needed library off the net, like CPAN, 
if needed to.  You can also TEST partitions and see if they are networking
partitions, and remove them from consideration with find.


> NFS.  Figuring out how to make automount filesystems DTRT (when they're
> configured to automount /usr/local/borked-source on the fly but they aren't
> mounted when the find runs, for example) is left as an exercise for the
> masochistic reader.
> 
> I hate to say it, but GTK is *NOT* the most difficult thing in the world to
> install. If you can't be bothered to read the directions and understand the
> tools, maybe you need to make a decision:
> 

I agree.  GTK is not the hardest thing, but GTK and GNOME aps are a nightmare.

Ruben



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