John R. Culleton wrote:
>
> Not at all. I was noting that on two different flavors of linux
> it is necessary to download and install material beyond that
> contained in the Gimp download in order to get it to compile. And
> that wasn't true in prior versions. Perhaps the missing module
> should be put in with the Gimp tarball if that is legal and
> practical.
i imagine that when you compiled prior versions of the Gimp you failed to notice
that you already had libraries/headers et al required to compile. an
easy mistake.
as long as i can remember the Gimp has been dependent on external libraries
for compilation. there are very few applications that aren't.
it would be great to be able to ship all the sources required to compile
but frankly that would produce a very large tarball; each time you download
the sources you'd be downloading these extra libraries all over again.
that would be boring.
there are a number of other complications/inefficiences involved also. one that
comes to mind
are the difficulties produced by duplicate libraries. for instance, imagine
having a libjpeg installation
from your distribution (/usr/lib) *and* another from our hypothetical Gimp
source tarball (/usr/local/lib).
of course you could throw all the sources of dependencies (if legal) into this
tarball, compile and install
them to a non-system wide location, and then link against them.
this would produce what is known as a statically linked binary.
Apple users are used to this, but they are also used to having duplicate libs
scattered all over the system;
static linking is esp common in their ~/Applications directory - very
messy.
as a Linux user however, this would drive me bonkers..
Julian
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