Re: gEDA: A complaint about glib-2.6 in libgeda

[sdb-at-NOSPAMcloud9_dot_net (Stuart Brorson)]

> 
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 07:04:21PM -0500, Ales Hvezda wrote:
> > [snip]
> > >However, gstdio doesn't exist on my machine.  I believe it is
> > >from glib-2.6.X.  IIRC, Ales says that gEDA/gaf requires only
> > >glib-2.2.  Therefore, this #include shouldn't be there.
> > 
> > 	Yes, I would like gEDA/gaf to run using gtk+/glib 2.2.x
> > for at least one more release.  Then I'll bump up the minimum version
> > to either 2.4 or 2.6.
> 
> Just as a datapoint, Debian 3.1 released last June has glib 2.6.4,
> as does FC4 released in July. FC3 (November 2004) had 2.4.7.
> 
> I think a minimum of 2.4 would be generous, and 2.6 not unreasonable..
> (2.8.0 came out in August and there are pre-2.10 development releases
> available.)

I gotta disagree about this.  GEDA is a desktop app, not a
bleeding-edge kernal developement tool.    Therefore it will be used
on all kinds of platforms, some of them fairly old.  It will be used
by all kinds of users, many of them not the least bit interested in
anything more than just running the program to design boards.

In the real world, there are a lot of older systems out there.  FC1
was released only 2 -- 3 years ago, which is the blink of an eye in
user time.  Requiring the user to upgrade to teh latest distro &
version is a turn-off for the many users who just want to crank out
boards.   Therefore, I prefer Ales' approach to support all the way
back to GTK-2.2.  That way we pick up RH9 (I believe). 

Personally, I would key the dependency requirements to time, not
version.  That is, I would allow support for any RedHat distro of the
last 5 years, any SuSE distro of the last 5 years, any Debian distro
of the last 5 years, and so on.  However, this requires more thought
than requiring GTK-2.2 (or whatever), and so I am happy with the way
Ales defined it because I provides several years of backwards 
compatibility. 

Stuart