Fellow Steppers,
Is there really some reason that we are continuing to have the -art
backend *not* be the default backend?
Are dependencies really an issue? Most users blindly do a apt-get
install gnustep or emerge gnustep and wouldn't care nor notice the extra
dependencies.
Now, let's do some comparisons of dependencies in other projects; for
example, I'll do a ldd on /usr/bin/gnome-about (stripping out the
libraries with the word 'gnome' in it):
libSM.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libSM.so.6 (0xb7f35000)
libICE.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libICE.so.6 (0xb7f1c000)
libbonoboui-2.so.0 => /usr/lib/libbonoboui-2.so.0 (0xb7ebd000)
libxml2.so.2 => /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2 (0xb7dbe000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libpthread.so.0 (0xb7dae000)
...
libtasn1.so.2 => /usr/lib/libtasn1.so.2 (0xb726e000)
libgcrypt.so.11 => /usr/lib/libgcrypt.so.11 (0xb7224000)
libgpg-error.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgpg-error.so.0 (0xb7220000)
libexpat.so.1 => /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1 (0xb71ff000)
libnsl.so.1 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libnsl.so.1 (0xb71eb000)
For sake of brevity, I will just say that the ldd output is 51 lines
long. Now, a quick and dirty guesstimate on how many dependencies
GNUstep has:
( ldd
/usr/GNUstep/System/Library/Bundles/libgnustep-back.bundle/libgnustep-back
; ldd /usr/GNUstep/System/Library/Libraries/libgnustep-gui_d.so.0.9.4 ;
ldd /usr/GNUstep/System/Library/Libraries/libgnustep-base_d.so.1.10.1 )
| sort | perl -wpe 's/^\s*([^\s]+) =>.*/$1/' | uniq | wc -l
31
That's with -art. The major extra dependency that is required going
from -xlib to -art is libart2, but that is already installed on a lot of
people's computers due to GNOME and is not near as much of a pain to
install as KDE's qt3.
-xlib is ready to meet its end. It has its purposes - places where you
really can't afford the extra dependencies (advanced users can very
easily use ./configure to change it). Other than that, -xlib just looks
bad and -art is just a much more capable backend. Why not have the
users using the same thing that all the developers are using already?
Hopefully we can come to some conclusion one way or another (whether it
be a poll amongst developers, or what-not). I am really hoping this
isn't going to turn into the 200 message flame-wars that results in
nothing but confusion as to what actually resulted from the flame war.
(We have far too many of those). Once and for all lets just end this
question since I have seen it come up far too often.
What do others think?