Re: gEDA-user: gschem with cairo rendering

[Marvin Dickens <mpdickens@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 23:50 -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:

Hello Dave - How are ya?

>    It's not a matter of lowest common denominator hardware...it's a  
> matter of assumed availability of every whiz-bang pre-1.0 library in  
> the Linux world.  Most big commercial UNIX installations (and there  
> are a lot more of them than many Linux folk are willing to  
> acknowledge) don't subscribe to the "upgrade libraries every other  
> week" mentality.  In a production environment, such a cavalier  
> attitude to systems administration just doesn't fly.  And just TRY to  
> get an overly-conservative network admin to build and install a  
> library whose release number is less than 1.0 even though it has been  
> around for a decade or more and is rock solid.  This is very common  
> in the Linux world, and the commercial UNIX world just can't wrap  
> their brains around that concept.

Good point: Commercial *NIX installations have slower release cycles and
further, when releases do occur, end users demand a reason to move to
the newer release. The move is usually instigated by the application
vendor in some fashion or another - ie: New application feature is only
available in the new application release that only runs on the new OS
release (Or some variation of this song and dance). In essence, the
application vendor dictates OS upgrades to the end user.  In the AIX
world, we only upgrade when we are certain that a new OS release will
not break production code.

In my mind, this conversation leads to the real world differences
between a closed software environment - Like AIX as compared to an open
environment - Like Linux or NetBSD. However, this is not the list for
that discussion.


> 
>    Even on my primary server on my home network (a big Sun running  
> Solaris10), the /usr filesystem is shared by seven virtual machines  
> that are doing seven very different things.  If I go dicking with  
> shared libraries indiscriminately there, I could break something else  
> that I'm doing, or worse, something of someone else's...either of  
> which could have a material impact on my income.

>From this post, I am lead to believe that you are the system
administrator for this particular Solaris installation. I seriously
doubt that you, as the administrator, would "indiscriminately dick" with
*any* file on this system.  

> 
>    As of right now, gEDA isn't just for students and hobbyists.   
> Commercial concerns do take it seriously.  If you want to destroy  
> that, and MAKE it only suitable for students and hobbyists, then the  
> fastest way to do that is to make it depend on fifty Linux-only  
> pre-1.0 libraries.

Wow - Destruction and mayhem. I'm just a simple kind of guy living in
Atlanta... I swear! Seriously: I can't speak for other users on this
list, but I (Read "We") use gEDA in a professional capacity - Everyday
and depend on it to make a living. Our shop deploys AIX, Solaris and
Linux machines with applications ranging from custom stuff written in
house to off the shelf products that we purchase support for.
Interestingly enough - The machines and apps that give us the most
trouble utilize closed software in some form or another - OS and/or
application code. In fact, we dump closed systems every chance we get.

Please note that I'm not interested in a flame war.  All I want is a
simple command line switch I can invoke when I compile gschem (Or maybe
even PCB...) that compiles Cairo and freetype into the apps. I'm 48 yrs
old and my eyes are not what they used to be - I like the clear and
concise rendering...


Best


Marvin

            -Dave
> 



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