[clue-tech] if it's not too far out of scope... audacity

[Nate Duehr]

On Nov 3, 2008, at 5:59 PM, David L. Anselmi wrote:

> Nate Duehr wrote:
> [...]
>> Bad packages or packages that don't exist, then you're back to the  
>> "dark ages" of compiling it yourself -- which isn't too bad for old  
>> hands at Unix, or developers... but the average user shouldn't be  
>> put through that.
>
> Well, you can read the directions for compiling at:
>
> http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/source
>
> It's 4 dependencies and 1 command (well OK, 2 plus one to install).   
> So it doesn't look very hard.

I don't care if it's just one command and wait for the coffee to  
brew!  :-)

Building from source just to get a commonly used application, isn't  
something an operating system should ever require users to do.

That's all I was saying.  :-)  (Sorry Gentoo fans.  You're just  
wasting everyone's time.  But thanks for a nifty view into the guts of  
building an entire distro from source.  I found it interesting but not  
worth it.)

> But you do have to know how to meet those dependencies.  Not hard to  
> learn but maybe distro specific.
>
> The real problem with building yourself is that you don't have the  
> benefits of the package manager to uninstall or upgrade.  But if you  
> want to see how to compile yourself we can look at that at  
> installfest.

And the menuing system chosen by the distro (for at least three to  
four different desktops) probably won't have the icon, or the  
application in it.  It won't be well-integrated.  Any distro-specific  
audio flags for the kernel or which audio sub-system is standard which  
affects the switch options used to compile the application (in the  
case of an audio application, specificially) won't be taken into  
account, the binary typically won't be installed in the standard place  
for the distro, nor the documentation...

Seriously... the era of any NORMAL user needing to know why some junk  
ends up in /opt and other junk ends up in /usr/local and...

Seriously deprecated.  Technology marches on.  :-)

Developers, tinkerers, someone who WANTS to build from source, fine...  
no complaints from here.

Pointing anyone toward it who's NOT interested in developing anything  
(probably a large majority of computer users) is kinda silly... unless  
someone's hoping they'll all of a sudden want to learn C/C++/[insert  
over-hyped language of the month here], and contribute code.

--
Nate Duehr
nate at natetech.com