gEDA-dev: Gschem and Cairo graphics library

[Peter TB Brett]

On Sunday 30 July 2006 13:53, Stuart Brorson wrote:

> Developers say "just use [yum, apt-get, etc]" to get the dependencies,
> but our target audience is not only other software developers who know
> these tools, but also ordinary users -- students, hobbiests,
> technicians, working engineers, and so on.  They are very often almost
> completely clueless w.r.t. administering a unix system, and are
> quickly put off by our software when they can't build it (and don't
> know how to handle the dependency issue).  From reading the
> complaints on this list as well as on the web, I've concluded that we
> lose a good number of potential users before they ever even draw a
> schematic since they can't install gEDA.  And the biggest reason they
> can't install is the dependency problem.

I still maintain that if someone can work out how to use a graphical package 
manager to install regular software, it's not overly optimistic to assume 
that the can use the same graphical package manager to install the 
relevant -devel, -dev or [whatever else they happen to be called] packages.

Cairo would be a very great aid in simplifying the addition of useful export 
filters to libgeda, as well as in making the renderer code more stable and 
easier to maintain.  The current gschem rendering code has problems: 
corruption of the active view occurs far too often, and it can get very slow 
for complex schematics.  Using Cairo's (transparent) hardware acceleration 
would be fantastic.

I personally see no objection to adding a library dependency, provided that it 
addresses an actual need (in this case it does), and that distributions can 
be reasonably expected to provide it in the core package set as opposed to in 
an 'extras' repository (it's in core on FC5 and Ubuntu, at least. I haven't 
checked other distros).

The fact it might make you CD not work quite as well doesn't really bother me 
hugely, I'm afraid.  Personally, I think it's a flawed concept.  The target 
audience for the CD (x86 Linux users who don't know how to build software by 
themselves) would be much better served by a klik package 
<http://klik.atekon.de/>.  Firstly, they're likely to be using 
a 'newbie-friendly' distro such as (K)Ubuntu, Freespire/Linspire, SUSE, 
Knoppix or FC5, most of which are well-supported by klik.  Secondly, it 
doesn't involve compiling software.  Thirdly, it doesn't involve installing 
system packages that might well be better installed from the package manager.  
Finally, klik packages are installed as non-root, and are easily uninstalled.  
I think that your extremely impressive effort might well been better spent 
working on that, rather than the CD.

I also think that the wiki installation pages are wrong.  At the moment, the 
easiest way to install the gEDA suite is to use the RPMs/DEBs/Fink packages 
that people have so kindly built, and get the package manager to sort out all 
the dependencies for you.

Of course, the best thing would be to have geda in distros' 'extras' 
repositories, but as you rightly point out it's quite hard to find 
maintainers for that kind of package.

<flame>Having said all that, telling developers who've worked hard on 
something of genuine use to go take their patches and shove it because it'll 
make your life slightly more difficult is really poor form.</flame>

Regards,

Peter

P.S. The wiki links in README-CD are out of date.

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