[GNC] Build From Source Near Impossible

[Adrien Monteleone]

Seems reasonable to me.

I'd think the only versions with instructions that are useful are those 
still supported by Canonical, namely, these LTS releases:

14.04 - EOL 4/24 (ESS 4/19)
16.04 - EOL 4/26 (ESS 4/21)
18.04 - EOL 4/28 (ESS 4/23)
20.04 - EOL 4/30 (ESS 4/25)
22.04 - EOL 4/32 (ESS 4/27)

Plus:

22.10, 23.04 & 23.10 (and other future non-LTS versions) when they are 
released and nuances are determined to need special instructions. (with 
those to be deprecated as they reach EOL)

Or maybe just only provide instructions for LTS and make a note that 
non-LTS versions aren't supported for long enough by Canonical to 
warrant their own documentation.

Note, the above EOL dates are based on Canonical's ESM (Extended 
Security Maintenance) available for both Enterprise and Personal Use. 
(free for the latter) See: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

That is 5 years beyond 'standard support'. (indicated as ESS above)

If the dev team wants to stick with the standard support window, then of 
course 14.04 & 16.04 can also be dropped.

Though, 16.04 was a breakpoint with respect to support for physical 
32-bit systems. At least some derivatives are still based on 16.04 for 
that reason. (a recent thread from a user described some difficulty 
getting a 4.x version to work on an older Linux Lite release.)

If someone can report their various results & mileage, maybe those older 
LTS releases can be sent to a sort of 'archive' page along with a note 
on the last version of GnuCash that could successfully build on them.

Of course, the recommendation can also be to advise the user to switch 
to a current distribution still actively supporting 32-bit hardware. 
(Debian/Devuan & Q4OS at least come to mind, I'm sure Distrowatch can 
inform concerning others.)

Regards,
Adrien

On 8/9/22 12:49 PM, david whiting wrote:
> I think we should remove the instructions from
> https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Building_On_Ubuntu for 21.10. Anyone
> have any objections to that?