[Pan-devel] Re: a few pan compile fixes

[Duncan]

Zing posted on Sat, 29 May 2010 04:22:51 +0000 as excerpted:

> On Fri, 28 May 2010 15:59:36 -0700, walt wrote:
> 
>> On 05/27/2010 06:03 PM, Zing wrote:
>>> Hello folks,
>>>
>>> The following are some fixes I had to make to get the lostcoder
>>> testing branch compiled on Fedora 13.
>> 
>> Hi Zing, and thanks for contributing.  (I speak only for myself. I'm
>> just a pan fan and not any part of the pan project.)
> 
> me too. :)
> 
>>> diff --git a/configure.in b/configure.in
>>> -GMIME_REQUIRED=2.4.0
>>> +GMIME_REQUIRED=2.5.0
>> 
>> I've read various man pages and tutorials about the gnu autotools and
>> every time I quit in the middle because of migraine or nausea ;) but
>> IIUC the changes above would break the build on my distribution, which
>> uses gmime-2.4.
>> 
>> The patches raise the minimum acceptable version of gmime to 2.5, am I
>> wrong about this?  Again, IIUC, my gmime-2.4 would flunk the test,
>> right?  Or wrong?
> 
> I think you are exactly right.  I also don't really know autotools, so
> my goal here was to get in and out without too much fuss to get a
> working pan on my system.
> 
> I basically couldn't figure out a way to specify any gmime version above
> 2.4 (specifically including 2.5/2.6).  That may be on purpose, or there
> may be a way; I don't know.  I suppose, in an ideal world,  Fedora would
> have provided a gmime24 compatibility package and this wouldn't be an
> issue, but alas, no such package exists today (maybe it should?).  If
> that is so, then maybe just best to ignore the gmime patches for now.

AFAIK from experience based on a library upgrade some time back, gmime or 
glib or something, where a dev from OpenSuSE actually did most of the 
patch modifications (based on initial work like yours from someone else, 
IIRC) and testing on various OpenSuSE versions, and I was pretty much his 
off-OpenSuSE tester (on Gentoo) and the upstream pan bug filer and 
updater, it's possible to use ifdefs and the like to code for multiple API 
version support, which is I expect what would need to happen here, but 
it's not trivial, certainly not for someone not as experienced as he 
obviously was, in such compatibility maintaining API version ports, and 
the results definitely need tested not only on multiple versions of one 
distribution, but on at least two different distributions, to be sure 
they're appropriately universal in application.

Let's see if I can dig up the bug in my old pan bugmail folder...

Found it!  It was the upgrade to glib-2.16, the OpenSuSE developer in 
question was Daniel Rahn, and the bug link is:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=524620

You can see the original error and patch, and how it was changed, there, 
tho the development thru several testing versions isn't there as it took 
place over private email. I suppose you'd check the SVN commit log to see 
how it was actually applied, tho gnome's on git now, and I'm not sure if 
they ported the svn back-history or not.

That should at least give you an idea of the approach taken when old-
version compatibility needs maintained.  I'm not a dev, just happy to test 
and bug report when it comes to this sort of stuff, so I'm not going to 
muddy the waters by trying to explain further what I don't understand 
myself.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman