Re: Draft GNUstep download page

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Sunday, January 19, 2003, at 11:50  pm, Richard Stonehouse wrote:

> Adam,
>
> There's now a revised draft download page at:
>
>     <URL:http://www.rstonehouse.co.uk/extras/gs-versions.html>
>
> > For the pre-requisites, I'd like to change 'Unstable/Stable' to
> > 'Required/Recommended'. For instance, for gcc, only perhaps 2.9.3 is
> > required, but 3.2 is recommended.

Some oddities in the 'Required?' colimn ...

gmp ... I'd ask Fred Kiefer about this ... he added the gmp support and 
I'm not
sure he was happy with it.  I think that it is supposed to be entirely 
optional.

Foundation Extensions ... copyright not owned by FSF and not used in any
GNUstep software ... perhaps should be optional or deprecated.

Steptalk/jigs ... while both are nice, jigs is the more fully tested 
and better
documented, so why is steptalk 'recomemed' but jigs 'optional'?

> Re. gcc - how far back is it safe to go with versions? At some point
> (3.0.x to 3.1?) I think there was a change that required a linked
> modification to binutils; also, if you go far enough back (< 3.0?), the
> gnustep libobjc special may be required. Perhaps someone who knows can
> give advice?

It's safe to go well back into the gcc-2 series with the gnu libobjc, 
but
I think it's simple to stick to the gcc-3 series.  Nicola would know 
best.

>   - Database Lib & Display Ghostscript - refer to xdps - obsolete???

Should have gdl2 and renaissance I think.  These may be relatively 
unstable,
but they are good stuff.

> I'm confused about iconv, for which Dennis's Build Guide specifies
> version 2.1.2 or better. Should it refer to *libiconv* (on the
> referenced page, with versions 0.2 to 1.7), or to */usr/bin/iconv*,
> which is part of glibc-common-2.2.93-5 on my system?

It's iconv library support that's needed. not any of the executable 
tools.
But you get that library support automatically in any moderately recent
glibc, so you only really need libiconv on systems that don't use glibc.

> Also, just checking, I note there are newer versions of:
>
>   - gnu make    - 3.80
>   - binutils    - 2.13.2.1
>   - gmp         - 4.1.2
>   - guile       - 1.6.1
>   - openssl     - 0.9.7
>   - libxml      - 2.4.30, also 2.5 - 2.5.1
>   - WindowMaker - 0.80.2
>
> Are there good reasons for sticking with older versions, i.e. the new
> ones may be unstable or - at any rate - so far untried by GNUsteppers?

I don't know about the others, but gstep-guile has not been ported to
guile 1.6.1


The page looks nice ... good layout.