Re: gEDA-user: Old version of geda ?

[sdb@xxxxxxxxxx (Stuart Brorson)]

A little OT whining.  I apologize in advance.

It seems to be a common practice amongst the Linux packagers these
days to leave out many packages important for software development.  I
have been learning this the hard way as I test and harden the gEDA
Install CD.

You speak of Fedora.  Fedora offers you four types of install when
building a new system:  

1. Personal (Desktop)
2. Professional (Workstation)
3. Server
4. Custom

I generally use the Workstation install.  SuSE, BTW, offers a similar
choice. 

Prior to FC4, the Workstation install included by default all the
required dependencies for compiling the entire gEDA Suite.  Now,
however, I am finding that pieces of important packages (e.g. guile)
are left out, and you need to install them manually.  In the specific
case of guile, it has been split into two RPMs: guile and
guile-devel.  The important stuff required to compile libgeda now
lives in guile-devel which is not installed by default.  Why not?
Booo Fedora! 

You can get this stuff installed when building a new system if you
know in advance what you need, and then browse through menus to have
it loaded.  However, it should come by default, IMO.  SuSE play a
similar game -- You need to browse through menus a layer or two down
from the top level to select the packages required for proper build of
gEDA. 

I imagine that this is due to some misguided desire to shorten the
buidl process, coupled with some marketeer's decisions about which
packages are important to the "non-technical end user" (who is
probably the target user these days).  However, this is just
disgruntled speculation.  

In any event, it doesn't take more than a minute to install the entire
guile package (instead of only 1/2 of it), so why didn't Fedora do
that?  No wonder there are so many (too many) different home-spun
Linux distros out there now.

Stuart


> > I am bewildered by this comment.  I had the impression that this
> > part is the same as Debian, so you would do:
> > "sudo apt-get install gcc g++ g77 bison flex"
> > and it is done.
> 
> Yes.  This is so.  But you have to know the names of all the packages.
> 
> So what happens is you try to build something and if fails.  Then you try to 
> figure out why the "./configure" failed.  Generally it is very adaptive and 
> trys a lot of different ways to get things to work before giving up.  It is 
> not clear what package is needed.
> 
> So you install one package and try again, and repeat about 20 or 30 times. 
> Seems like a big waste of time.
> 
> There should be some master dependency package called "development 
> environment", like exists on Fedora.
> 
> Regards,
> Bert 
> 
>