On Friday 2 July 2010, Derek Atkins wrote: > Greg, > > Greg Troxel <g...@ir.bbn.com> writes: > > Christian Stimming <stimm...@tuhh.de> writes: > >> thanks for this research. To me, this sounds like it would require > >> significant efforts to get back into a source code state that compiles > >> on CentOS 5.5. IMHO this effort gives only very little gain. Hence, > >> IMHO we should acknowledge that our support of this distro has been > >> dropped already, and hence we should increase our required gtk et al > >> versions accordingly. > > > > What I don't get is why people who are running these "long-term stable" > > releases that intentionally have old versions of software expect to run > > new versions of some other kinds of software. I don't do anything > > useful for gnucash, so there's no reason to listen to me, but why does > > anybody care if the current gnucash version works on stable/old systems? > > It's a reaction to the early 1.x days of gnucash where you needed a > bleeding-edge system in order to build/install/run GnuCash 1.6 when it > was released. If you had a system older than, oh, 6 months (maybe it > was 3?) you couldn't build 1.6 on it. Obviously there was a lot of user > crying and flack to the developers for releasing code that couldn't be > used unless you were running Debian unstable. > > As a result we (well, I think I instigated it and got buy-in from the > majority of developers) suggested a policy of not releasing anything > that required a dependency newer that 1 year old. I.e., you should be > able to take a system you installed a year ago and install a fresh > release of GnuCash on it. > > We created this policy almost a decade ago. At the time, the longest > long-term release was Debian, at about 18-24 months between "stable" > releases. In the interim, however, RHEL seems to have extended that to > about 4 years between major releases. At least, I think RHEL 5 was > released somewhere around 2006? I think it was based off FC6 which was > 4 years ago. Or was RHEL 5 == FC3? I don't remember anymore. > > In any event, the lack of a RHEL refresh has changed the game some, so > yeah, I think it's time to re-evaluate our policy some. The problem, of > course, is that RHEL 5.5 hasn't changed the version of gtk > significantly. So even though it was only recently "released", it > hasn't updated the dependencies. > > I still maintain that users should not be forced to be running Debian > unstable in order to build/install GnuCash. > That makes sense to me as well.
What RHEL is concerned, I think users of RHEL5 will probably be ok with GnuCash 2.2.9. It fits the stable-and-conservative strategy of that distro. I do agree on a middleground for selecting dependencies. Debian still seems to be the reference for conservative package choice. Geert _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
