kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Richard A Burton" <richardaburton@...>]

> > Many Linux distributions have only wxWidgets 2.6 as stable.
> > Some distributions doesn't have wxWidgets 2.8 at all!

Debian does not have wx 2.8 yet (due to it being unstable upstream (so
I'm told)). At the moment Debian provides kicad on over a dozen
platforms, to a great many users.

> I for one, do not wish to be killed. However, if JP has a valid
> reason for *requiring* 2.8, then I will find a way, as a developer, to
> compile that version from source code on my linux distribution,
> whatever it is.

Hopefully we can find a way to do that. There is other 2.8 stuff in
kicad but there some #defines to make it compatible with 2.6 so it's
not a problem. Probably this can be worked around too, after all it's
just a bitmap on a toolbar.

> JP recently agreed to use subversion, so we need to make his life
> easier, not harder.

Agreed.

> When we make a *release* as opposed to a commit, it has been JP's
> practice to statically link in the xwWidgets library of his choice.
> So this has no effect on his linux users whatsoever. (So long as
> libc.so and libstdc++ are compatible.)

When a binary release is made, but who downloads binary releases of
open source software? Traditionally people download the source and
compile it themselves, a great many open source projects don't provide
binary releases on unix platforms at all. Unless of course you're
getting it pre-packaged from your distro, then it's going to be
dynamically linked against libraries available in that distro. i.e. if
backwards compatibility with wx 2.6 isn't kept it won't be possible to
package new versions for Debian until wx 2.8 is added (which I am
pushing for despite it's issues - for one thing pcbnew is slower with
2.8).

Richard.