Detecting shared library problems

[Bill Gribble]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 09:33:33AM +1100, Ben Stanley wrote:
> The bane of a GNUCash user's life seems to be getting all the shared
> libraries installed - and learning what a shared library is etc.

Yes, this is a pain right now, but it will be getting easier.  Gnucash
doesn't depend on much more than a Gnome 1.4 installation plus
reasonable versions of guile and slib, which should be more and more
available after gnome 1.4 is released :)  

Gnumatic will probably be selling installable CDs of gnucash-1.6
shortly after its release, containing gnucash plus the dependencies
that aren't in a stock system (for the most common "stock systems"),
which will also make things easier for people who aren't afraid to
spend a couple of bucks.

Also, we are planning to move to a module-oriented system in the
development series after gnucash-1.6, which means that you can load a
basic gnucash with no bells and whistles that has many fewer library
dependencies.

> One would hope that rpm and other packaging systems would look after
> this for us, but a recent posting to the gnucash-users list would
> seem to indicate that this is a continuing problem.

Actually, it's really just RPM.  The Debian packaging system doesn't
have these problems.  It's probably not a very popular idea with Red
Hat, but the single biggest improvement they could make IMO is to
adopt the Debian package format and tools.  The volume of library
related problems on gnucash-user would dwindle to pretty much nothing.
 
> Unfortunately it doesn't solve the problem of long dependency
> chains, but I have been able to find out that library X is supplied
> by package Y without having to have magical knowledge...

That's a really hard problem, for sure.  The Debian folks have beat
their heads against it for a long time before finally coming up with
more-or-less the right answer.  Not to say that Debian is perfect by
any means but they have made a lot of progress on the package tools.

b.g.