On Tuesday 01 March 2005 16:13, Tariq Rashid wrote: > although this may sound like an inappropriate question - its not. > > i am now starting to produce documents that will need to be as good > as possible as they are for public consumption. > > i have always used mandrake (now 10.1) as my workstation as it has > had quite up to date software ... but i am finding it a pain to > keep up with inkscpape and scribus development. > Heh, its the same for developers. Inkscape 0.40 was *very* difficult to get working on Suse 9.x. Its much easier now however with updated support libs available.
> never mind the fact that mandrake, amongst other major distros, > ship ghostscript 7.07! > No rpm distro AFAIK except for betas/cooker of Mandrake have anything newer than 7.07. The long standing reason is the lack of CUPS integration in GPL GS 8.x - now fixed and migrating into distros. For major distros upgrading to GS 8.x is complex and is comparable to going from GCC 2.9x to GCC 3.x. That said, installing a parallel version of Ghostscript 8.50 is not too difficult. I have provided very complete instructions on docs.scribus.net.. I've yet to receive complaints about a broken system from my hints. :) On the other side Ghostscript as shipped by RedHat/Suse/Mandrake can be looked at as a: a fiendishly complex work of hackery or b: a marvel of integration via sed/perl/rpm macros. ;-) Even someone like me who has been around PC 's before they were called PC can't but helped to be impressed to plug in a new USB printer in Suse and without any (interaction/dialogs/feed driver disk/reboot) have a fully configured and working printer automagically and recognized by the desktop apps. And some people think the Linux desktop sucks... > i wonder if a more "source" bases OS is a better idea to keep up > with changes upstream, whilst keeping the local workstation > integrated - ie if i update ghostscript i don't want CUPS printing > to break, etc etc > See above. > do people use rolling (non-release) systems like gentoo? freebsd > ports? netbsd pkgsrc? debian testing? > > the core question really is which distribution gets the upstream > changes in a timely manner? > With respect to Scribus IMO, *the* most important issue is how Qt is both compiled e.g the ./configure switches, which are complex *and* the packaging, which often have a grab bag of patches. I've cracked open the source packages for Qt packages of some of the major distros while we were hunting down a drag and drop bug in Scribus, which ended up being a Qt issue. Doing that, I learned some about how Qt/KDE is built. My vote: Suse Their most current rpms: a: are compiled closely to the KDE developer recommendations b: also include patches and fixes which often get sent upstream to Qt. Suse employs a fair amount of KDE devels who do know their way around Qt. c: Suse usually is one of the first major distros to release updated KDE/Qt rpms when KDE announces a new version. There were Qt 3.3.4 rpms available very shortly after it was announced and they were a painless upgrade without breakage.e.g. rpm -Fvh ./qt* done d: I observe far fewer issues with Suse's Qt + Scribus than any other distro based on bug reports, the mailing list or my own usage. Second choice would be RH/Fedora. They have do not have the same number of devels supporting Qt, but their current packaging has removed all the ugliness of RH 8/9 days and its sane. Despite perception, there are RH/Fedora devels who do like KDE and many use it as their main desktop. FC-4 will be the first distro which will have GCC 4 standard and GCC 4 is *far* more particular about c++ correctness, along with giving c++ apps a performance kick. Where rpm/packaged distros win vs. source distros is maintaining multiple machines. Its not difficult to make a buildroot for rebuilding SRPMs which can then be installed on other local workstations. The scribus spec files in both Fedora and Suse have been massaged carefully for a long time, so they should just work (TM). I don't know much about packaging Debs, so I can't comment. I'm not really sold on how Debian packages Qt, but that's my personal taste. Using RPM is much easier than even a year ago. Apt-rpm is available for Suse/RH and others. Plus like the fedora-develrpm tools make building them much easier locally. Just my personal thoughts, nothing meant to be official ;-) Peter
