From: Alan Horkan (horkana@maths.tcd.ie)
Date: Sat Aug 23 2003 - 06:21:17 EDT
On Sat, 23 Aug 2003, Michael Braun wrote:
> > Who knows how gentoo does their magic. I don't. Ask on a gentoo mailing
> > list. Frankly I always thought gentoo was for hackers who could work all
> > this stuff out for themselves.
> >
> > Otherwise install debian and get a sane binary distro which fully
> > supports AbiWord.
> pssst...be nice...
he was being nice, and perfectly reasonable. many people have tried to be
very nice.
Abiword is unstable, building from source will be difficult, that is why
so many volunteers make the effort of providing binaries. As far as I am
concerned building from source puts you in a niche, and crosses the line
between simple user problems and developer problems.
Abiword works fine, the abiword packages or build system for Gentoo are
the problem here so it is not unreasonable to expect your distribution to
provide some support.
The developers made plenty of suggestions that might help. mg one of the
packagers of abiword for gentoo tried to help too (iirc there is a problem
which he is waiting for foser to fix, so you will have to be patient and
wait or try something else). mg and foser are the two people most likely
to know what the problem is, a mere two out of the many people on this
list, but many other developers such as Martin have gone to the effort of
trying to help you as best they can. If the developers were not being
nice do you think they would have made so many responses in an effort to
help you?
Abiword is vastly easier to get running on more popular distributions
because more people run and test abiword on those distributions. This is
the downside of diversity, and until a wider standard for package
management arrives developers will continue to be forced to spend a huge
amount of resources just on packaging their software.
The best technology is not necessarily the best answer, popularity is
hugely imporant when it comes to technology.
Distributions like Gentoo dont pretend to be user friendly, Debian doesn't
much either,
> I was compiling from source, hence the "compile" and
> "./configure". Don't really see a reason why a gentoo listserv would give
that is not nice, and it is not smart to patronise Martin in particular or
anyone else just because they dont happen to know exactly how to use your
distribution.
> me any greater insight to compiling abiword and libwpd than those who
> wrote it--do you?
the developers have tried their best, and compling from source is
not easy and at best is very time consuming.
We are a volunteer run project and people are making big efforts to help
you so please think very carefully before you make personal criticizism.
unstable builds are exactly that. I am confident that mg and foser will
between them resolve any build problems for Gentoo by the time 2.0 is
ready, which is not far off.
please do bear with us, but we are trying our best, cut us some slack.
please please keep in mind that we are all doing this completely
voluntarily and unpaid in our spare time.
Sincerely
Alan H.
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