gnucash's dependencies criticized

[Thomas Spahni]

Developers, Paul,

many thanks for 1.6.0 which is (and look and feels) great. Outstanding
job! The trouble seems to be to compile gnome which is "a pain in the ass"
(to say the least).

This is my experience:

Platform: SuSE 6.4 (moan!).

Downloads of required gnome packages were 72572k (without gnc). Unpacking
and compiling blew this up to more than 1 Gig and completely filled
available space under /home.

It was a 3-days fight with dependencies. When a program complains about
missing "capplet" libraries it takes some time to figure out that they are
provided by control-center-1.4.0.1. In package gnome-vfs-1.0.1.tar.gz the
./configure was broken and had to be hacked manually to recognize
gnome-print. Furthermore I had to downgrade from bonobo-1.0.4 to
bonobo-1.0.2 to make it work.

Once everything was in place gnc-1.6.0 compiled nicely. I still have to
add guppi support (yes, I have compiled and installed Guppi-0.35.5 but gnc
./configure pretended it can't run the test program). The whole
installation procedure is not for the faint hearted and once I started
upgrading libraries my production version of gnc-1.4.12 was dead :-((

Please don't misunderstand: I am not complaining. My concern is that
ordinary users are just out of luck. As long as SuSE and RedHat are not
providing a running configuration "out of the box" ordinary users
(compared to people with some insight into a Linux installation) will not
be able to install gnc.

Cheers, Thomas in Zurich/Switzerland

------- 
On Fri, 15 Jun 2001, Paul Lussier wrote:

> most of them weren't related to GnuCash, but because of the "domino 
> effect" (i.e. I upgraded package A because of GnuCash, but package A 
> depended upon packages B, C, and D, and B, C, and D, depended upon 
> packages E and F, etc.)  Additionally, there were packages in those 
> 23 that had nothing to do with any of this, but rather, since I was 
> upgrading a bunch of stuff anyway, I went ahead and upgraded some 
> others.

How true; you end up installing things like db2html ...

> I don't use Gnome a whole lot (nor KDE for that matter), but with 
> today's ridiculously low prices for ridiculously large hard-drives, I 
> load both environments on anyway, because they both come with apps I 
> might want to use sooner or later.
> 
> -	It's not really DLL hell, since you can have multiple copies
> 	of the same library installed for use by different apps.

It is strongly recommended to uninstall any trace of an old gnome
installation before compiling the new 1.4 one. Anything else is looking
for trouble.

> 	So far under Linux I have hardly seen any abuses of
> 	this. Shared libraries are generally reserved for geniunely
> 	sharable code, and the rest is statically linked the way it
> 	should be.

The problem with having many libs pieced together is the incompatibilities
between them as long as everything is evolving. It is a true adventure to
find a matching set of packages. Taking all the latest packages doesn't
work.

> -	Once this software becomes part of a Linux distribution, the
> 	package dependencies will take care of those 60 libraries for
> 	you.

Hopefully, yes!

> Besides, regardless of how many dependancies it has, IT'S FREE.

Spending three days on upgrading and compiling costs much more than buying
a commercial product. But that is what free software is all about and I go
the GnuCash way because I like the program and open software in general
and not because it's cheap or free.

> Btw, I know there's room on the development team for those willing to 
> contribute some of their free time to making GnuCash a better FREE 
> application.

I'm going to look into adapting the German version to Swiss German. Keep
your eyes peeled for this, but no delivery date is promised as I have
another project higher on the priority list.