On Monday 18 February 2008 18:01, Pavel Sanda wrote: > > It shouldn't be this difficult to compile LyX. It wasn't this difficult a > > couple years ago. > > actually this should be the job of your distro maintainers, not lyx.
I've been hearing a lot of that type of comment lately, and I think it's dead wrong. My distro maintainers did a tremendous job of compiling a great LyX 1.4.2. Works every time, never crashes. But now I want to upgrade LyX without installing a newer operating system. I don't think that's too much to ask. One could counter that if I used Debian I could just apt-get install the whole thing. Well I don't use Debian -- I like Mandriva and have been using it since 2000, and I would certainly like to see developers not place stumbling blocks of specific versions and subversions of tools. Interestingly, it appears that in order to upgrade to qt 2.2.3, I would need to upgrade my glibc (because of rtld(GNU_HASH)). I'm sorry, but that's just too much to expect from a user. Then there's the fact that some of us have dialup, and some in rural areas are years from getting broadband. The "just upgrade your qt" suggestion could be a day's downloading over a phone line that could go down any time. Most of the free software I've written has been in Perl or Ruby or Vim, but I've always tried very hard to have it installable on almost anything. SteveT
