gEDA-dev: guile-1.8 requirement

[Dan McMahill]

Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 10:17:29PM -0400, Stuart Brorson wrote:
>> The big-picture question is:  Which Linux distros do we want to
>> support?  Is SuSE 9.3 too old?  SuSE 10.x?  How about FC2, 3, 4,
>> 5.....   If we define a few distros which are "supported", and declare
>> older ones "unsupported", then we can see which use guile-1.6 and
>> which use guile-1.8.
> 
> My question is, why do you expect to use current gEDA without upgrading
> the rest of the OS?

how about "why do you expect that users should have to update their OS 
just to use tools which really are not that tied to the OS version".

> 
>> computer equipment).  And I'd bet that lots of gEDA users are on
>> machines approaching (or over) 3 years old.

or older.

> But is there any reason why they can't upgrade the OS? For example why
> are you still using an old SuSE version?

mission critical software which is already running and not wanting to 
risk breaking things?

> Perhaps I'm spoilt by Debian (and derivatives)'s ability to upgrade
> without reinstalling. Honestly I can't understand why anyone would use a
> system without it.

thats part of why I really detest the linux "lets install gtk in /usr" 
mentality.  I really prefer a more lean base install and then using a 
packaging system like NetBSD's pkgsrc to manage all of the third party 
libs.  Thats worked well for me on NetBSD and solaris.

-Dan