Is there anything I should know to replace GnomeDruid with GtkAssistant?

Derek Atkins warlord at MIT.EDU
Fri Jul 2 10:39:49 EDT 2010


Greg,

Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com> writes:

> Christian Stimming <stimming at tuhh.de> writes:
>
>> thanks for this research. To me, this sounds like it would require
>> significant efforts to get back into a source code state that compiles
>> on CentOS 5.5. IMHO this effort gives only very little gain. Hence,
>> IMHO we should acknowledge that our support of this distro has been
>> dropped already, and hence we should increase our required gtk et al
>> versions accordingly.
>
> What I don't get is why people who are running these "long-term stable"
> releases that intentionally have old versions of software expect to run
> new versions of some other kinds of software.  I don't do anything
> useful for gnucash, so there's no reason to listen to me, but why does
> anybody care if the current gnucash version works on stable/old systems?

It's a reaction to the early 1.x days of gnucash where you needed a
bleeding-edge system in order to build/install/run GnuCash 1.6 when it
was released.  If you had a system older than, oh, 6 months (maybe it
was 3?) you couldn't build 1.6 on it.  Obviously there was a lot of user
crying and flack to the developers for releasing code that couldn't be
used unless you were running Debian unstable.

As a result we (well, I think I instigated it and got buy-in from the
majority of developers) suggested a policy of not releasing anything
that required a dependency newer that 1 year old.  I.e., you should be
able to take a system you installed a year ago and install a fresh
release of GnuCash on it.

We created this policy almost a decade ago.  At the time, the longest
long-term release was Debian, at about 18-24 months between "stable"
releases.  In the interim, however, RHEL seems to have extended that to
about 4 years between major releases.  At least, I think RHEL 5 was
released somewhere around 2006?  I think it was based off FC6 which was
4 years ago.  Or was RHEL 5 == FC3?  I don't remember anymore.

In any event, the lack of a RHEL refresh has changed the game some, so
yeah, I think it's time to re-evaluate our policy some.  The problem, of
course, is that RHEL 5.5 hasn't changed the version of gtk
significantly.  So even though it was only recently "released", it
hasn't updated the dependencies.

I still maintain that users should not be forced to be running Debian
unstable in order to build/install GnuCash.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available


More information about the gnucash-devel mailing list