Re: build problems

[Ben Pfaff]

Ed <address@hidden> writes:

> 2008/5/27 Ben Pfaff <address@hidden>:
>> John Darrington writes:
>>> My recollection is that there were two problems.  Editing po/Makevars
>>> only solved one of them.  Unfortunately I don't remember the exact details.
>>
>> I wish that I had documented the problem that 0.16.1 caused,
>> either in ChangeLog or the CVS commit log.  But it looks like I
>> didn't.
>>
>> I'm kind of inclined to drop the requirement back to 0.16.1,
>> because it's bad to tell people "you need 0.17" and not why they
>> need it.
>
> I think the problem might have been that .q files aren't parsed
> successfully by 0.16.1 (at least I noticed when building last night a
> stream of errors about "suffix .q not recognised". This means those
> parts won't be internationalised properly without 0.17. Would an
> acceptable compromise be to add an autoconf warning if gettext is <
> 0.17 that some text may not be translated?

I don't think that is really a problem.  I believe that we have,
or at least had, some kind of option in the appropriate place to
tell gettext that .q files should be treated as containing C
code.  It worked OK for years, before 0.17 was released.

>> I haven't looked at your patch, but I guess it sounds reasonable
>> to me to try to accept patches to support older GTK+, as long as
>> you don't expect us to be able to support those versions forever.
>> Debian is in the midst of the release process, which will bring
>> GTK+ 2.12 into stable.  At that point, I assume that you wouldn't
>> mind us dropping the backward-compatibility support?  I don't
>> think it would be a problem to support 2.8 for 6 months or a
>> year.
>
> I'd be happy to drop support soon after Debian/stable catches up (or
> come October when my PhD finishes!) I just can't risk my machine until
> then, but would like to contribute (I suppose I could work without GUI
> if its a problem, but in my experience, its best to keep everyone on
> as close a page as possible, otherwise you start breaking the bits
> that you don't see day to day).

I agree.

Anyone object in principle to dropping the gettext requirement
back to 0.16.1, or to temporarily dropping the GTK+ requirement
back to 2.8?  John, I think you probably have the strongest
feelings about this, so please let us know.  (I have not looked
at Ed's patch yet, so I'm not asking for comments on how he tried
to do these things, only on the proposal to do so somehow.)
-- 
"Implementation details are beyond the scope of the Java virtual
 machine specification.  One should not assume that every virtual
 machine implementation contains a giant squid."
--"Mr. Bunny's Big Cup o' Java"