gnucash and the LSB

[Dan Kegel]

The LSB is coming.  Has anyone thought of doing an LSB package of gnucash?
Here's a little story about why it's worth thinking about even now,
months or years before LSB-compliant distributions are available:

The gnucash rpm shipped with red hat 7.2 beta2 installs and runs.

However, it makes my screen go all funny.  I use 256 color mode, and gnucash
steals all the colors.  No reason for a finance package to do that.
Consider this a bug report :-)

But RH7.2beta2 comes with gnucash-1.6.1, so maybe it's fixed in the 
new version at gnucash.org.  Sadly, downloading the two competing
gnucash-1.6.2-1.i386.rpm's there yields

# rpm -U gnucash-1.6.2-1.i386.rpm
error: failed dependencies:
        libgal.so.8   is needed by gnucash-1.6.2-1
        libgnomeprint.so.11   is needed by gnucash-1.6.2-1
        libgtkhtml.so.13   is needed by gnucash-1.6.2-1
        libguile.so.9   is needed by gnucash-1.6.2-1
        libreadline.so.4.1   is needed by gnucash-1.6.2-1       

# rpm -U the-other-gnucash-1.6.2-1.i386.rpm
error: failed dependencies:
        libgal.so.8   is needed by gnucash-1.6.2-1
        libreadline.so.4.1   is needed by gnucash-1.6.2-1  

The RPM on gnucash.org isn't compatible with red hat 7.2, it seems.

[root@dual downloads]# rpm -q -l readline | grep readline.so
/usr/lib/libreadline.so.4
/usr/lib/libreadline.so.4.2  

Sigh.  I guess to build an RPM of gnucash for red hat 7.2,
you have to *do* it on red hat 7.2.  

That's not a great state of affairs.  The Linux Standard Base will
solve this, right?  But guess how it solves it: it requires your
package to have *no* external dependencies, except on what's
in a very vanilla linux system.  The Gnucash project could 
have that benefit right now if they wanted, by statically
linking to those libraries that won't be in the LSB.
And that would make it much easier to share RPM's between various
flavors of Red Hat 7.x.

This is not a silly or specious idea.  It looks like the wave of
the future.  Has anyone at gnucash considered what it would take
to put together an LSB package of gnucash?

- Dan

-- 
"I have seen the future, and it licks itself clean." -- Bucky Katt