gEDA-user: On the nitty-gritty of user-experienced problems

[Karel Kulhavy <clock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello

1) gtk has bug in the web version of INSTALL instructions. It
says that Xft must be installed. "installed" is an ambiguous word.
Presence of ambiguous words leads to failures when a users tries to
do exactly what's in INSTALL and still fails, because uses different
meaning of the ambiguous word than the author meant.

"installed" can mean:
a) the package is present on the system and is not corrupted
b) the package has been installed in the past and was not deliberately
removed or deliberately corruped, only installations or removals of
other packages were made, and doesn't show any signs of corruption in
everyday usage of the system.

If you install freetype2 into /usr, then install xft, then remove freetype2,
then install freetype2 into /usr/local, you get a system where GTK doesn't
compile even if you follow web version of INSTALL exactly, provided that you
think that "installed" means (b)

It can be solved elegantly - you just have to write "installed correctly"
and then either
a) GTK writes a guide how to test whether a Xft installation is still
installed correctly from all points of view on arbitrarily given system
without knowledge of prior installation and deinstallation actions on the
system, or
b) Xft writes a guide how to test Xft's installation on arbitrary system,
and GTK links to this guide, or

2) fontconfig is one of transitive dependencies of GTK.

fotonconfig homepage has bad URL in the download link on the title page.
Instead of http://fontconfig.org/release, there is
http://fontconfig.org/wiki/http:/release
Double presence of "http" and single slash instead of double after the
latter occurrence strongly suggest there is something wrong with the URL ;-)

It is not possible to download fontconfig unless you reverse engineer their
web and somehow magically guess the right URL. If it happens to me, I assume
also other users will be annoyed by this. This may take a lot of time to
resolve, depends on your luck when trying various URLs.

3) fontconfig titlepage contains an ambiguosity that prevents you from
understanding what is the latest stable version, if 2.2 or 2.2.3.
I won't put the whole details again here, I will just supply bugzilla item
URL here:
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2282

I am already trying to install new version of gEDA for second day.
I do not expect Windows users with Orcad will have problems with:
* INSTALL ambiguosity
* bad URLs at system component webpages
* ambiguosities in transitive dependencies' projects' webpages
They just click (and pay).

I think the users may be even less experienced in IT than me (I got a
Master's degree in IT at Charles University (founded 1348) from operating
systems, compilers and networks) - for example, they may be EE professionals
with little knowledge of IT and still they might want to use gEDA.

Nor is this a problem of the fact that a distribution is not present on my
computer. Neither gEDA nor GTK states any requirements that any distribution
must be present on the computer for them to work. Actually, they work without
a distribution in most other cases.

Unless problems like this are resolved, I expect average Joe EE will have sever
problems installing gEDA.

I expect people from RedHat who administe GTK will quarrel about me that
it's users fault when the INSTALL is ambiguous. 

I have been already quarelling with Linux kernel people over absence of
a specification or user's manual on their kernel. I asked one friend who
does coder at multinational gigant firm and he confirmed it's common in
programming to specify every small piece of code. The Linux people simply
refused to even admit that such thing should exist.

So I don't have illusions about maintainers understanding what's the purpose of
INSTALL file. Mantras like "the code is the ultimate specification",
"understood something different than we meant? It's your problem! That's
because you don't know how the internals work!","You got what you paid for" and
similar are common problem in free technology world and I think they have to be
uprooted prior to free technology serve their purpose completely: help people.

So I suggest:
1) either write a petition against INSTALL ambiguoisities and pester the
maintainers until they fix these problem (these problems can be easily blamed
on the users but are the very core of the fact so much people are having more
problems using Linux than Windows)
2) or supply gEDA simply with it's own copy of GTK etc.

Did you ever encounder a Windows distribution? RedHat Windows, SuSE
Windows, debian Windows, slackware Windows, mandrake Windows, etc.? No.
People are installing and deinstalling programs on Windows manually.

Why does it work? Because in the Windows word, people are less lazy to write a
step-by-step guide how to use the program correctly. Sometimes it also
doesn't work, but less often than with Linux. The guide is often somehow
incorporated in the installer program.

Cl<