32 bit gnucash won't open in pclos

[John Ralls]

> On Apr 25, 2016, at 1:15 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> On Sunday 24 April 2016 00:08:35 Doug wrote:
>> John,
>> wash your mouth!
> 
> It seems to me John's reaction was a direct response to the bad name calling the PCLOS 
> maintainers initiated in the IRC conversation with Mikee.
> 
> That's simply not the best way to start a conversation. I'm glad Mike took it relatively lightly 
> and particularly he shared it on the gnucash mailing list.
> 
> To be clear I don't want to turn this into a flamewar between gnucash and PCLOS. On the 
> contrary even. I'm responding here in hopes to avoid that!
> 
> I sympathize with the PCLOS maintainers. Gnucash is a complex piece of software with many 
> heavy dependencies. I can understand their frustration when these dependencies change. I 
> have been there myself while working on the Windows port and so is John as maintainer of the 
> OSX/Quarz port. On top of that, as distro maintainers gnucash is just one of many complex 
> packages to worry about.
> 
> In this case the frustration could have been avoided by talking to us. And this message is also 
> my open invitation to do so faster in the future.
> 
> As said in my previous message, I can't guarantee we can fix all packaging issues but we 
> certainly can and love to share what we do know.

I actually have much broader concerns about all of the minor distros with small teams: They can't keep up with vulnerabilities. Yeah, GnuCash is complicated, but WebKit, OpenSSL, Apache, and the kernel are way more complicated, and keeping them up to date on a net-facing system is critically important. So that's a serious question for everyone who's using "boutique" distros, especially if the distro isn't repackaging one of the majors: Are you getting timely security updates?

If not, you really must switch to a major like Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora/Centos/RHEL, and OpenSuSE or a distro that's based on one of those and passes through its security updates.

I completely agree with Geert about packagers: We want all distros to ship the latest stable GnuCash. If a packager is having trouble building, he or she should ask here or on IRC for help.

Regards,
John Ralls