Re: build problems

[Ben Pfaff]

Hi Ed.  Pleased to meet you.  Sorry it's taken me so long to rejoin
the discussion after my first message.  I was hoping that you and
John could come to a consensus.

Ed <address@hidden> writes:
> (1) gettext-0.17
> - seems to be required so that AM_XGETTEXT_OPTIONS is available (to avoid 
> gnulib
>   warnings), however the output clearly shows the alternative to requiring a
>   whole version bump of gettext is to edit po/Makevars. Essentially, some 
> gnulib
>   modules have requirements for po/Makevars that they can append automatically
>   if AM_XGETTEXT_OPTIONS is available, otherwise this edit is required.

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.

> (2) gperf
> - despite the immense configure process, gperf isn't tested for (you get to 
> make
>   and it dies)

I think that John pointed out that this isn't an issue unless
you're building from CVS.  README.CVS does say that you need it.
Is that good enough?

> (3) gtk+-2.12
>   There are only two places where post 2.8 APIs are used:
>   ( i) the data import wizard
>        Files affected:
>          data-editor.c
>          text-data-import-dialog.c
>          text-data-import-dialog.h
>
>        Uses a GtkAssistant (new in 2.10). Fix is to make compiling
>        text-data-import-dialog conditional on gtk-2.10 (automake.mk) and the
>        single call out from data editor condiitonally compiled.
>
>   (ii) tooltips in the treeview
>         Files affected:
>          dict-display.c
>
>        Uses GtkTooltip rather than the old GtkTooltips (new in 2.12). Fix is
>        to make the affected method and its caller conditionally compiled.
>
> The following is a patch against current cvs that allows pspp to build
> with gettext-0.16.1 and gtk-2.8.20, which are the most recent versions
> available in debian stable. The functionality is 99% percent present
> (could be more, but why work too hard when all you have to do is wait
> for the fix to present itself - this is enough that I could work on
> pspp now...) All that is missing is tooltips in the tree view and the
> import text data wizard.

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.
-- 
Ben Pfaff 
http://benpfaff.org