Re: Laundry list for AS 2.0 beta3
Sasha Vasko (sasha@aftercode.net)
Fri, 02 Jan 2004 11:42:34 -0600
Bob McClure Jr wrote:
> Well, I took the plunge and downloaded and built AS v.2.0 beta3. I've
> been using 1.8.11 for a long time. Very nice eye candy and (mostly)
> good functionality. Here are the problems I encountered. First, my
> machine:
Wonerfully detailed list, and I shall start nailing them bugs ASAP.
Few words though right away :
Bloody RedHat ( and debian to the best of my knowledge ) for some reason
separate graphic libraries files into two packages - one needed to run
already compiled applications, and another required to actually compile
applications. Second package mostly includes headers, but still you
cannot compile AfterStep with support for such library if those headers
are not present. As the result users get profoundly confused wondering
why despite the fact that libraries seems to be installed, support for
them is unavailable in compiled apps.
That is the reason of you not being able to use PNG images with AS - you
need to install second part of the graphics libs packages.
Now, I've made it possible to supply images in two formats with the
distro ( PNG and XPM which is not dependant of any library - AS has its
own parser for XPM files) What is needed to make it available is to
convert all the PNG images into XPM copies ( should be stored in
blah/blah/xpm subdirs ). Then Makefiles will pick those up automagically.
The reason it was not done so far was that No matter what you do - you
loose some quality while converting into XPM, or your XPM images turns
out huge. Second reason is that this will grow distro by not less then a
meg. Third reason was that I'm waiting for for set of icons to be
finalized.
But what angers me most of all is this stupid package separation in Rad
Hat and Debian. I mean even if it saves couple hundred K on harddrive,
it makes no noticeable difference, after installation of such garbadge
as KDE/GNOMe, while causing sufficient confusion and inconvinience. I
mean why would I want to rob AfterStep of PNG support just becouse
distro has stupid packaging scheme.
All that crap makes me even consider embedding libPNG into AS distro -
something that I resisted for a long time.
> Before I build with debugging on so I can send a debug log, I thought
> I would see if some of these could be fixed without that. Let me
> know.
I don't need your log at this point. I can see a way to reproduce most
(if not all ) of the problems.
>
> Cheers,
Thanks again
Sasha
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