Re: gEDA-user: pcb HID has been merged!

[sdb@xxxxxxxxxx (Stuart Brorson)]

> You can also build without the png HID.

OK -- I'll probably do that for the install CD

> I'd rather _not_ include 3rd party libs directly because what happens is
> invariably there is some problem on some platform.  I'm not speaking
> directly about gd here, but generically.    [ ... ]

Fair enough.  My concern is that gd introduces yet another dependency
for the poor, beleagured install CD.  I can look into this myself -- I
know -- but if gd is there only to e.g. build the documentation, then
perhaps its output can be pre-included in the distro tarball and gd
won't be needed by users, only developers.  In this case, it's not a
problem for the install CD.  Next, if gd is compiled into PCB, but
provides some little featurette which isn't part of a base install,
then perhaps it could be a configure option which defaults to off (or
I can --disable-gd during configure)?  But if gd is now a mandatory
dependency, then I need to put it on the CD as another dependency,
since lots of vanilla distros apparently don't support it.  (It was
absent on my FC2 laptop, which I have loaded up with lots of developer
goodies.) 

> [ ... ] So it
> can actually be a barrier to include the 3rd party libs.  In otherwords
> when libfoo included in the pcb distfile fails to build, it becomes a
> pcb problem directly.

Yes, that's my point.  Thrid-party dependencies are also an install CD
problem since the point behind the install CD was to provide the end
luser a complete, easy-to-install gEDA package with none of the usual
Linux dependency-hell problems.  A dependency like gd may offer shiny,
new features to pcb, but it's also a PITA to the users who don't have
it installed.   

Anyway, I suppose this is another reason why distributing statically
linked binaries is the way to go.

Stuart