Will GnuCash ever work for me?

[Bill Gribble]

On Fri, 2001-09-21 at 11:06, Derek Neighbors wrote:
> I think you summed this up nicely.  I know for GNUe and recent dependency
> issues, we have contacted the distros (redhat, debian, etc) and asked what
> version of X will be in your next release.  Then we are coding our
> dependencies to that. 

This isn't possible with Gnucash.  We depend on several Gnome libraries,
namely gtkhtml and (indirectly, through gtkhtml) libgal, which are not
part of the "standard Gnome platform" and won't be at least until the
release of Gnome-2.0.  Indeed, libgal will probably never be part of the
standard Gnome platform, according to Havoc, Maciej, and several other
Gnome people who jumped down my throat when I suggested it should be. 


The attitude of the libgal developers and the general Gnome leadership
is that gtkhtml and libgal are internal libraries of Evolution until
Evolution reaches its 1.0 release, and that until that time there is by
definition no standard version of these libraries.  Furthermore, it was
made clear to me that any application that depends on libgal gets what
it deserves when the major version gets bumped by Ximian and they stop
packaging the old version. 

That's what has happened to us several times now.  It's impossible to
"synchronize" with Gnome because the libraries that cause us trouble are
not part of the Gnome release process.  We build a binary package that
depends on major version X of libgal, they bump the revision to X+1, and
stop making X available. X and X+1 aren't binary compatible, naturally,
because they differ in major version, but frustrated people who don't
know any better do stuff like make symlinks from libgalX+1.so to
libgalX.so, and of course it breaks. 

This is a more-or-less temporary problem, on the geological time scale,
because Gnome-2.0 will include gtkhtml-2.0 which is not dependent on
libgal.  However, gnome-2.0 is a major API change from the current Gnome
releases and will require a significant effort by Gnucash developers to
port to.  It's my opinion that this will be for the 1.9 development
series.  Since the 1.8 stable series will still depend on libgal via
gtkhtml, we can see that this dependency problem will not go away for a
long time, and there's nothing we can do to fix that as long as we build
RPMs that people download, unless we VERY, VERY closely track the
up-to-the-minute Ximian GNOME libgal release and update our RPMs every
time they do.  That's a lot of work.  

The  distros will pick up whatever version of libfoo is handy at their
build time to get Evolution to work, but everybody will be grabbing the
latest from Ximian anyway so the problem persists. 

With Guile, we have people kicking and screaming to use versions from 3
years ago, but with Gnome, we can't make them use stuff more than a
month old :( 

I'm sure there's an outlook on this that puts the Gnome managers in a
more positive light, but I can't see it at this point.  I am very
irritated with the way they have managed this process. 

b.g.