[Gambas-user] Printing

[Benoit Minisini]

Le Mardi 27 Mai 2003 08:58, Radoslav Dejanovic a écrit :
> On Tuesday 27 May 2003 04:35 am, Ken Schrock wrote:
> > >But perhaps we should wait for Gambas to get some maturity on Linux
> > > platform first, before migrating to other platforms?
> >
> > You mean wait until Gambas is big and ugly like VB 4.0 before it is
> > ported?
>
> No, I'd be happy if it could compile out of the box on my SuSE :))
> This is the first thing why we should consider Gambas immature at this
> point. While the language and underlying algorythms might be perfect, the
> fact that it doesn't compile out of the box is really bad thing. It
> prevents language from being included with distributions (SuSE has only
> some old release, perhaps because of building troubles?), and the rapid
> development stage (as is happening now) will prevent everyone but
> experienced programmer from giving it a try.
>
> So what we have here, as I see it, are two things: disability to compile
> out of the box, which is a bad, bad thing, and fast development, which is
> just great. But these two do make Gambas immature. The first step should be
> to try to solve building showstoppers.

I agree with you. 

I develop on Mandrake 9.1, so it is easy for me to make gambas working on it.

For the other systems, SuSE sent me a SuSE 8.1 for free, so I could check 
gambas on it, and I try to get RedHat when I can. I can't test on SuSE > 8.1.

The big problem is that Linux evolves quickly, and that the different 
distributions do not hesitate to change many things between versions that 
breaks gambas compilation process.

There is another problem in the dynamic library loader of Linux that seems to 
have problems with the way some libraries replaces symbols of other 
libraries. For example, KDE as its own malloc() implementation. As gambas 
loads QT and/or KDE by components, and not by using the linker, these bugs 
arise ! And there are very fews applications like gambas that deals with qt 
and/or kde this way.

Another problem is Trolltech that easily changes the internal of Qt at each 
version without claiming it, and this breaks the gambas qt component.

The last problem is the NVIDIA Open-GL driver that is buggy, because it cannot  
be loaded as a shared library without crashing.

But don't worry, I think all these libraries and distributions will stabilize 
in the future.

Free software is an adventure.

-- 
Benoit Minisini
mailto:gambas at ...1...