gEDA-dev: guile-1.8 requirement

[Dan McMahill]

Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 03, 2007 at 09:34:24PM -0400, Dan McMahill wrote:
>> Hamish Moffatt wrote:
>>> 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".
>>
> [...]
>> 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.
> 
> I think there's a key difference here which isn't really worth arguing
> about. You want a minimal core OS with very basic functionality, with
> everything else being accessible through pkgsrc, ports etc. 
> 
> Linux distributions tend to make everything including the kitchen sink 
> available as first-class packages, releasing the whole lot in one go. I
> don't know if your pkgsrc repository actually has releases which are
> co-ordinated with the base OS, or does it float independently?

independent releases.  pkgsrc supports many more operating systems than
just NetBSD (dragonflyBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, linux, solaris, darwin,
irix, aix, osf/1, hp-ux, and interix at last count).  pkgsrc has 
releases once a quarter and it is a little easier to hold to that 
schedule for pkgsrc where I think thats a bit much for the base OS.

> We install gtk in /usr because it IS a core lib to us. Plenty (most?) of
> modern GUI apps use it. We ship guile as a first-class package. And we
> release an OS containing gtk+, guile and for that matter gEDA as matched
> versions. 

Doesn't that cause major headaches for users who need to install newer 
versions of some packages but yet can't afford or are not permitted to 
do a full OS upgrade?  It seems like it is harder to keep from seeing 
libs in /usr/lib or headers in /usr/include than it is to hide stuff 
installed somewhere else.  One use case I'm specifically thinking of is 
one where the OS is installed by a sysadmin and updates are relatively 
infrequent.

Anyway, I don't want to get way off topic here but I do hope we take a 
conservative (and I think we generally do with geda) approach to 
requiring the latest in 3rd party libs.

-Dan