gnucash's dependencies criticized

[Paul Lussier]

In a message dated: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 12:48:13 +0200
Thomas Spahni said:

>Developers, Paul,

(heh, who woulda thought I'd get mentioned in the same line as 
developers, a shy, quiet, end user like myself ;)

>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).

Gnome, IMO, is far more to blame for problems in general than any 
other piece of sw one may install on a Linux system these days.  I 
know very little about the Gnome architecture, but from my 
observations have led me to believe that Gnome is becoming 
increasingly bloated and incestuously dependent.  Everything in Gnome 
depends upon esound for example (why the gnome-print needs sound is 
completely beyond me, but this is a perfect example of a ludicrous 
dependency.  Someone please explain this one to me!)

Gnome is also not very intuitive to the average user for example.  
I've sat end-users down in front of both Gnome and KDE, and from a 
usability standpoint, the KDE folks win hands down.  (That being 
said, I prefer the look and feel of Gnome to KDE, however, I use 
neither, opting for function over form and simplicity with fvwm2 :)

At this stage in "The Life of Linux", things are still a little too 
cumbersome and non-functional (wrt intuitiveness and usability) for 
the non-technical person without the capability of digging into 
things like /var/log/messages and apt-get showpkg output.  Until 
things get significantly better, I don't think we can expect Linux on 
the desktop.

HOWEVER, things are vastly improved from even just 1 year ago.    And 
in 1 year from now, things will be significantly better even still.  
It's a slow evolution, and until the core infrastructure is actually 
finished, and the framework complete, things will be rough.  Once 
these core components achieve a finished state, we can then begin 
tuning, tweaking, and refining them (much like what is going on with 
X Windows now, almost 20 years later :)

I think a lot of the criticizing we're hearing are from people who 
have become sick of whatever platform they're stuck with, and have 
heard our zealous and passionate cries that Linux is a superior 
platform, and now they want to experience it.  However, our passion 
tends to leave out things like, "Oh, you just install these 30 
libraries, grap these 47 packages, install these 24 things from 
source, re-install 10 libraries and 15 packages which depend upon the 
stuff installed from source, and you're ready to go!" :)

We're still in what's known as the "Early Adopter" phase of the life 
cycle.  Unfortunately, we've been so successful at convincing people 
how great life is with Linux, we've forgotten to mention that it's 
only great if you have a huge amount of patience and tolerance :)

>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.

WOW!  That's a little ridiculous.  I already had Gnome installed on 
the system I installed 1.6.0 on, therefore, I merely needed to 
upgrade/install a few packages.  I am in the process of trying to get 
1.6.0 installed on my laptop which is running RedHat 6.0.  That is 
proving to be a *little* more challenging :)  I do have significant 
portions of Gnome installed already, but I'm running into a space 
issue, since it's an old laptop.  

>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

Aha!  That's where libVFsomething-or-other comes from :)  I was 
trying to figure that out last night :)  Thanks!

And I agree, some of the error messages from the package managers 
(rpm/apt/dpkg) spewing things out like "libxyz requires libabc" 
aren't too helpful if you can't figure out which package actually 
contains "libabc".

>./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.

Ouch!  You're installing Gnome entirely from source?!  Now that is 
something *no one*  should be forced into, definitely not for the 
faint of heart!

>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.

I definitely agree with you.  And as I pointed out above, I think 
it's going to be some time before "ordinary" users are able to deal 
with Linux in general.   There's just too much that isn't finished 
yet.  Both KDE and Gnome are still works-in-progress.  Until they're 
completed, and the developers can start working on tuning/refining 
them, I think it's going to rough going to for end-users who just 
"want things to work".  Fortunately, for the most part, we have 
distributions available where most of this is taken care of for the 
user.  They just need to install the initial environment, and that's 
it.  GnuCash maybe a bit tough to feal with right now, but I'm 
willing to bet the next release of RH, SuSe, Mandrake, Debian, etc., 
all contain gnc-1.6.0, and the end-user never knows the difference.

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

Sadly, I wholeheartedly agree with you.  Though this does seem to be 
a Gnome-centric phenomenon.  It gets worse if you try and mix in 
ximian packages also.  I have not heard of this being true with KDE, 
or even in the general sense.  Most complaints I hear about this, 
when you dig a little deeper, always seem to come back to Gnome.

>> 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.

Well, true, time is a valuable asset.  However, spending three days 
up front to get GnuCash installed and running is, IMO, time better 
spend than constantly having to reboot into windows to use Quicken or 
MS Money.  That may only be a few minutes each time, but how much 
time is wasted over all.  Is it worth it in the long run for you to 
have to maintain 2 environments?  Even if you spend $50 for Win4Lin, 
or $300 for VMware so you can continue using Quicken or MS Money, and 
not have to reboot, you still need to maintain 2 completely separate 
environments.  I think over the long haul, that's likely to consume 
more time than just the 3 days you've spent setting up GnuCash, not 
to mention the hard drive space wasted between the 2 different OSes.

>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.

Well, I personally won't benefit from that, but I'm sure there are 
thousands of Swiss who would greatly appreciate that.  So, on their 
behalf, please do so :)

Thanks for an engaging conversation :)  We should probably take this 
off-list, though, since it does seem to off-topic :)
-- 

Seeya,
Paul
----
	If we spent half as much time coding as we do bashing
	 others for not supporting Free/Open Source Software,
	      just imagine how much cooler we would be!

	 If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!