Re: How up to date is this?

[Idar Tollefsen <idar@kdc.no>]

Adam C Powell IV wrote:

Thank you for your reply. It cleared up a lot of things for me, and I'm
left with a better feeling of how the package and distribution cycle work
for the different versions of Debian.

>> Where is gdk-pixbuf? I have installed all thinkable
>> imlib, gtk and gnome development packages from the
>> frozen Potato, but gdk-pixbuf is nowhere to be seen.
>> I finally went out and got it from ftp.gnome.org
>> and compiled and installed it myself.

>IIRC, this is going to be part of GNOME 1.2, which is currently at 
>1.1.90, i.e.not quite stable.

It's true that gdk-pixbuf was to be found only in the "unstable" branch
of the GNOME source tree, but there was a directory for it in the "stable"
branch refering to the unstable versions.

However, I do see your point. It's not stable so it has no place
in Potato. On the other hand, who ever compiled Dia had to have
it installed. And shouldn't the users have the possibilty to install
all development packages needed to compile the other Debian packages?
It's a little like "No, this development package is not stable so we 
won't include it in this stable realse. But hey, here go right ahead and 
get this stable package I compiled with it." I almost feel that any package 
requering gdk-pixbuf should also have been taken out of Potato if it's 
so unsafe to trust users with it in a stable version.

That didn't come out quite right, but I hope you understand what I mean.
If they can deliver programs for the stable version that requires
gdk-pixbuf to compile, what reasons do they have for saying gdk-pibuf
itself isn't stable enough to be included?

> The libart-dev package has all of the header files, static libs, .so symlink,
> etc.  In general, if you have a lib but can't build something that depends on
> it, get the lib's -dev package.

I did. I installed libart-dev, but that doesn't install libart.h, which
I'm quite sure is supposed to be part of that exact pacakge. I even removed
it and reinstalled it to make sure no mistakes or errors had crept into
the installation of it.



Sincerly,
Idar Tollefsen