g-wrap lost - So am I

[Conrad Canterford]

On Thu, 2002-09-26 at 20:12, David Tangye wrote:
> You can take my initial post in this positive light if you want to.

Unfortunately, the tone of it irritated. I hope you understand that both
Chris and I have worked (in the loosest sense) on gnucash for a number
of years and seen a number of very talented people devote a huge amount
of time to it and develop it a long way. We're talking thousands of
person-hours in the last three years. While I'm sure your intentions
were good, it is hard to see the good intentions when left with a
feeling that all this hard work is being criticised over something the
developers have very little control over.

> Yup, I am sure. But if you select "Upgrade RedHat" you just get the 
> stuff already onboard upgraded. Then you think "Neat, now all I have to 
> add in gnucash". Wrong. You get stuck and do not get a simple list of 
> packages to also add - that is my point.

As a point of history, when gnucash 1.6 was first released (or maybe it
was late in the development leading up to 1.6, I don't remember), we
were given some very bad press for "the number of dependencies" gnucash
relied on. The main problem was that gnucash was relying on the gnome
1.4 libraries at a time when gnome 1.4 didn't ship with your average
distro, but the developers had had to make a choice - do we implement
the features we want now and lead the pack, or wait until gnome 1.4 is
standard before we implement? If we'd held back, development would have
been held back by anything up to 6 months. As it happens, we're now
being pressured to upgrade to gnome 2, and we're not ready to do so....
but that's another story.

> So to rephrase. Can someone give me a simple list of rpm's to include 
> into a gnucash install, so having upgraded RadHat so gnucash will run, I 
> can now simply add the required stuff and off I go.

OK. From memory, to run gnucash 1.6 you will need these:
(I have included version numbers as I remember them for the benefit of
people not installing off redhat 7.3 cd's. The versions of these
packages on the redhat cd should be fine).
guile-1.3.4 or later
g-wrap 1.1.11 or later 1.1.n or 1.2.n (NOT 1.3.n)
gnome-print (basically anything but 0.25 from memory should work)
libgnome-print (same)
gtkhtml (any recent version should be fine)
libgtkhtml
Guppi (0.36 or later?)
perl (this is an rpm thing, its not essential for gnucash to run)
oaf
bonobo
all gnome 1.4 packages (pretty much)
libxml
popt

There the main ones you might not have installed. You will probably find
most of these installed if you have gnome installed.

If you continue to have problems after checking/installing the above,
email me back personally, and I'll see if I can help you more.

> OK, so we agree that to change a distro just because one particular app 
> *might* then install more easily is a bad idea. Sure sounds like a giant 
> leap sideways to me.

Oh, it will install easier, of that I have no doubts. debian's packaging
system does a much better job of things than rpm does, and apt-get is
much smarter. I'm just not sure what the other repercussions are of
using debian yet (I've been using it for less than a month on my sparc
machine).

> I am 
> out of development these days, as I said retired and gone into a totally 
> different vocation.

As have I. 

Conrad.
-- 
Conrad Canterford  (conrad@mail.watersprite.com.au)
Water Sprite Pty Ltd   |  url - http://www.watersprite.com.au/
GPO Box 355,           |  - Australian Tour and Event Management (ATEM)
Canberra, ACT 2601     |  - Ticketing Division.
Mobile: +61 402 697054 |  - Catering Services Division.