Dependency hell redux

[Bill Gribble]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 04:34:56PM -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Ok, I'll bite.  I've had problems with Gnucash since a few months ago.
> And yes, I've reported them.  I'm on a fairly-stock Red Hat 6.2.  I
> don't want to destroy my current installation, which includes Gnome
> 1.2 and Guile 1.3.

Gnucash 1.6 requires Gnome 1.4.  I expect that by the time we release
gnucash-1.8, we'll be depending on Gnome 2.0, but IMO we should make
it a "scout's honor" sort of thing that Gnome-1.4 will always be good
enough for gnucash-1.6.x.

Guile 1.3 is fine; in fact the Gnucash-1.6 rpms on ftp.gnucash.org are
linked against guile 1.3.4, which has caused lots of problems for
Ximian Gnome users.  In fact, maintaining guile-1.3 compatibility is
(I'm about 90% sure) what caused the problems that led to Jon Corbet's
bad experiences with gnucash.  Most people are using Ximian Gnome
these days.

I think dave will be uploading a gnucash-1.6.0 RPM that uses guile-1.4
today, but the old one will stay too.  Again, by the time gnucash-1.8
comes out, I expect it will be requiring guile-1.6, but also again,
"scout's honor" that guile-1.3.x will continue to work with
gnucash-1.6.x.

> I wouldn't mind having a sand-boxed version of all the libraries
> required for GnuCash, but no such set of GnuCash-sandbox RPMs exist.

We have discussed the possiblity of doing this for a CD release.  I
think it's pretty important for a product people are paying for to
install smoothly just about anywhere.

However, for downloaded binary packages, I think we should support a
reasonable spectrum of standard install targets and after that make it
clear that you're on your own.  Instructions for compiling from source
should be more tutorial than they are now, and it should be more clear
exactly what versions of what stuff you'll have to install, but there
are only so many combinations we can deal with.

I hope you understand that by putting such restrictions on what you
will upgrade you take your system out of the space of normal user
cases that we want to be able to address out of the box with
downloadable RPMs.

> Honestly, I want the installation to be so easy that my MOM could
> do it.  Note that my mom can barely turn a computer on ;)

We're working on it :) gnucash-1.6 is intended to be a stable release
of gnucash, not a complete all-singing all-dancing commercial product.

Thanks,
Bill Gribble