Gnucash 2.6.10 question - Why WebKit ?

[Arno]

Dear Jeff,

Yes, the RHEL / CentOS 7 distribution also allows compiling and running old applications, also older GTK 2 / 3 applications. GNUcash is the only one to give me these dependency issues, I think mostly because of the WebKit requirement.

The Gentoo Prefix system looks promising and an interesting way of building/running apps. I will look into that later this week. 

The Docker way:

Run first:
xhost +LOCAL:

Then it is a matter of entering:
docker run -t -i -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix -e DISPLAY=unix$DISPLAY mbessler/gnucash

And in just under a  minute we have a working GNUcash (not the latest and greatest, I'll get to that later, but at least it works, which I cannot say of my private 2.4.x and 2.6.x GNUcash binaries).

Essentially it downloads an Ubuntu 15 (I think)  installation with all the associated libraries and stuff in my /var/lib/docker.

My preliminary conclusions:

- Works out of the box without any dependancy issues (they're all packed in the 1GB image file essentially, thanks to fiber not an issue downloading it). Ease of use.

- Away goes the efficient Linux lightweightedness system which has libraries only 1 time in memory. All libraries in 2 different versions in memory, double the disk access and double the memory usage and much slower startup times of your apps (even on SSD). 

- Standard UNIX safety based on UserIDs is partly thrown overboard as the GNUcash binary now runs as root in the container. I know that containers are not committing by default so as soon as the binary stops running the changes made in the virtual filesystem aren't comitted to disk automatically, but still an application should run with lower rights not being able to remove/modify system files). It is also possible to modify the image to add a user and run the application under that normal user, but it does not come that way.

- What about maintenance ? Essentially I should now be mainaining 2 OS'es on my computer, one Centos7 and one undefined Ubuntu installation which doesn't even have a shell and at the moment is more than half a year not updated.

- Maybe building a static binary with all the required fuctions from all the libs it needs into it would be even more efficient than the virtualisation way.

My current GNUcash (not working):
-rwxr-xr-x 1 arno users 52095 Dec 29 13:57 gnucash

Static GNUcash (assumption):
-rwxr-xr-x 1 arno users 256000000 Dec 29 13:57 gnucash

In my opinion the GNOME and GTK+ software developent has gone the wrong way. it has become an elephant instead of the playful dog it used to be. It started out as a quite efficient and standarized ways of programming graphical user interfaces on Linux and see where it brings us in 2016 ? Dependency hell in the libraries and a Gnome 3.X desktop which looks like a minimal Android tablet, but with sluggish performance (even on a Core i5, 16GB RAM, Intel SSD and NVidia GF 4xx discrete videocard, which can run Windows 7 with snappy performance, even in VMware BTW).

And in fact I am not the only one complaining about Gnome 3.x, one of my friends has already switched to KDE on his Fedora installation while he didn't like the Gnome 3 desktop and another friend who had been using Fedora for years is back on Windows at the moment... Just a quick search on the Net gives me 'Tom's Hardware: GNOME 3 Why it failed'.

It is just that I had only recently migrated to Gnome 3 and not as early as many people did, so I didn't notice the issues myselves, it was only from hear say.

As a Linux user and enthousiast since the early beginning of Linux (and an ICT specialist at the moment) I really hope a new and modern desktop environment and GUI libraries will be developed for Linux so we can leave these old GNOME, GTK+, GTK 2, GTK 3, GDK, Guile, etc, etc things behind and start up fresh.

Greetings, Arno


--------------------------------------------
On Wed, 30/12/15, Jeffrey Ratcliffe <jeffrey.ratcliffe at gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: Gnucash 2.6.10 question - Why WebKit ?
 To: "Arno" <nvana_31 at yahoo.com>
 Cc: "Geert Janssens" <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be>, "Bill Nottingham" <notting at splat.cc>, gnucash-user at gnucash.org
 Date: Wednesday, 30 December, 2015, 11:22 AM
 
 On 29 December 2015 at
 18:19, Arno <nvana_31 at yahoo.com>
 wrote:
 > Thanks for your updates. I know about the
 EPEL repository and have been using it for years in RHEL 5,
 6, Centos 5 and 6, but it always gives me unresolvable
 dependancy issues after maybe >1 years of usage, so I am
 trying to stay far away from it if possible for my CentOS 7
 setup.
 
 FWIW, the
 gentoo prefix distribution allows you to compile modern
 packages with an old distribution. I
 haven't tried building gnucash
 with it,
 but I have no problems building similar packages with
 gtk2/3
 or qt5 dependencies.
 
 It takes a while to bootstrap
 it, but once its up and running, it is
 way
 easier than trying to compile everything by hand.
 
 Regards
 
 Jeff