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

Stuart Brorson wrote:
You can also build without the png HID.


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

In the grand scheme of things, gd is pretty simple compared to say,
gtk or guile but it's your call. What you'll miss out on in the CD is
the ability to directly export a layout to png/gif/jpeg. For many users this is probably no loss at all. For those wanting to create some web docs it is more of a loss.

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.)

gd is what provide png/gif/jpeg export from pcb. You can always disable
it with configure flags. Try --with-exporters="bom gerber ps" (note the absence of png in that list).

When you're building from a distfile, you won't need any of the tools
used to build the documentation. It is only when you are building
directly from CVS, but in that case, oh well. You'll need tools! Well, thats unless you don't care about building the docs when building from CVS in which case just add --disable-doc.

-Dan