Build dependencies (was: Re: Request: require glib2 >= 2.12)

[John Ralls]

On Feb 20, 2010, at 8:55 AM, Geert Janssens wrote:

> On Saturday 20 February 2010, Christian Stimming wrote:
> I'm currently working on this one. Gtk 2.10 will be the base for now. I did 
> request an upgrade on the RHEL bugzilla to at least 2.12. We will need this if 
> we want to remove deprecated functions and be compatible with gnome 3. But 
> that's a concern for after 2.4.
> 
> 
> I do wish we could set a higher base for guile though. It's about the only 
> dependency left that requires a special compat header file. Upgrading this one 
> before the final 2.4 release allows me to do some additional code refactoring 
> for a more consistent use of the guile api. I started this just before new 
> year due to incompatibilities with guile 1.8.6+.
> 
> Doing this refactoring before 2.4 is branched will make it easier to backport 
> patches from trunk to the 2.4 later. I the refactoring happened after the 
> branch, it will be harder to backport (because the code bases diverged).
> 
> For linux distro's there's no problem. All current distros ship 1.8+
> 
> The issue here is the windows build. It is still configured to use 1.6. Since 
> we're working in the dependency areo on the windows build atm, it may be a 
> good time to switch to 1.8 there as well ?
> 

I too am using Guile 1.6 with OSX, because when I set up the builds in late 2008 Gnucash had problems with 1.8 and I haven't tried again since. I'll do so today or tomorrow and report back. 

WebKitGTK is another dependency that we need to assess, I think. They don't actually have a declared "stable" release yet, though they have a quasi-stable 1.15 branch. Their announced plan was to have a stable 1.2 out this summer, but their list has been  very quiet lately, so I'm not sure how they're doing on that goal. I doubt very much that they're worrying much about backwards compatibility, though, and if WebKitGTK requires gtk+-2.20, our efforts at backwards compatibility are futile. Does RHEL5 support building WebKitGTK -- or provide an RPM? 

Regards,
John Ralls