Re: gEDA-user: gschem with cairo rendering

[Stuart Brorson <sdb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> > IMO, using yet another external library is not worth the inevitable
> > support headache just to get some pretty fonts.

> It is getting quite frustrating to keep coding for the lowest common
> denominator, and I'm sure there are many win32 / UNIX boxes out there
> which have very few of our dependant libraries installed by default.

I have no problem with upgrading the version of GTK required.
Requiring other libraries are also OK.  My suggestion is to look back 3
or 4 years and see what was on common Linux distros back then and make
that the minimum.  For common Linux distros, I'd suggest:

Fedora
SuSE
Debian
Ubuntu

But remember that we also support other Unices:

FreeBSD (Dan)
Mac OSX

So we'd need to see what dependencies exist on those platforms.

In any event, my key points are:  3 -- 4  years since that's the
lifetime of a computer on the typical desktop, and look to see what
pre-exists on all the common distros (not just one of them).

> If we're talking Linux, I have less sympathy since there are very often
> easier ways to install distro pre-built versions.

Remember that lots of gEDA users are not hackers.  They're EEs who
want to use the tools without apt-get or yum.  Indeed, they may not
know that these tools exist.  Too often they are turned off by the
complexity of getting gEDA running on their particular platform.

> If we were to be more like Mozilla / various CAD packages, our
> controlled sources would include full, perhaps modified copies of such
> libraries, leaving external dependencies just a C library and perhaps
> libX11. I suspect distributions would not thank us for this, nor those
> who actually have copies of the relevant libraries on their boxes.

This is exactly what Ales' binary distro does.  We probably want to
push that harder as the preferred install package on the gEDA website.

Stuart


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