[64studio-devel] Upgrades: GIMP & GCC

[Free Ekanayaka]

Hi Tim,

thanks for the feedback.

|--==> tim hall writes:

  th> Hi all,
  th> I'd just like to confirm that the recent GIMP upgrade currently breaks 
  th> gnome-core on my machine. This is not good.

What is broken exactly? "Formal" package dependences, or actual
functionalities? I guess the latter, as I don't see any broken
dependency in the repo. If this is the case, I'm sorry we might have
to drop Gimp 2.4 and revert to 2.2.

  th> I also feel it might be worth mentioning that it looks like Debian are 
  th> pushing the gcc-4.3 transition through now. I know that there are a 
  th> couple of important multimedia apps that appear to be having trouble 
  th> with the transition like openmovieeditor, audacity also appears to have 
  th> some lively bugs. Rosegarden and Ardour seem to be making it through the 
  th> pass thanks to the persistence of their maintainers.

This needs work indeed. Forwarding the relevant bug reports upstream
would probably be a Good Thing.

  th> This process is only relevant to these packages being able to migrate to 
  th> Debian testing (lenny/sid) as Free already has measures in place to get 
  th> reasonably up-to-date versions of these multimedia apps into 64 Studio.

Right, we have a rocking backport system now :)

  th> My concern is that some of the Desktop apps with multimedia functions 
  th> are becoming out-of-date. I can't get support from lastfm, because I'm 
  th> using the deprecated version of their player, for instance, and the 
  th> handling of video within firefox is embarrassing. Everybody using Linux 
  th> appears to download and use a standalone player. That's great so long as 
  th> you don't want to try and do web-based video conferencing and 
  th> synchronise it with other web-based media. This particular trick 
  th> requires the latest versions of flash, realplayer, quicktime or windows 
  th> media. Whilst we can't be expected to support the latter options, it 
  th> would be really good to have multimedia support for web browsing that is 
  th> known to work. I'm afraid that ogg might as well be a proprietary Linux 
  th> format as far as most cross-platform developers are concerned. I know it 
  th> rocks, you know it rocks, but how do we convince them to roll with it? 
  th> I'm talking about Linux-sympathetic developers here too.

At least for flashplugin-nonfree, a backport of the sid version is
available in the testing branch of 64 Studio. I can try to backport
lastfm as well, feel free to ask more backports. As long as they
succeed without too much work there's no problem in adding them.

  th> I know this stuff isn't the meat (i.e. pro-audio) of 64 Studio, but it 
  th> is the candy, which potential migrators will look for. If they can't 
  th> watch videos on youtube with the sound in sinc, they will assume that 
  th> everything else is crap too. 'Scuse my bluntness.

You're right. As far as I can tell flashplayer doesn't work with jack
yet though.

  th>  From a user/testers perspective I think it would be great if 64 Studio 
  th> testing tracked Debian testing all the time. I can just picture Free 
  th> holding his head in his hands as I type that. ;) It's got to be better 
  th> than backporting GNOME in order to include the latest GIMP? No?

Well, 64 Studio/testing has been a bit too much radio-active
lately. However the idea of 64studio/testing would be basically to be
a testing area for updates tarted at the testing branch. So,
everything should be relatively "stable", meaning that main libraries
and components should not change over the time. It was probably a bad
move to push on back backports for gimp 2.4.

Said this, the idea of Debian/testing is different, as this is a
testing are targeted not to the previously released version, but
rather to the next one, and things here can break more easly, as main
components are frequently replace and change over the time. My view is
this kind of thing is not what 64 Studio wants to offer, which is a
(supposed to be ;) ever stable and at the same up-to-date system. 

Anyway as I generally upload everything to Debian/unstable (and hence
eventually to testing), I would suggest that 64 Studio users willing
to stick to Debian/testing should simply upgrade to Debian/testing,
where all the development actually takes place. After that testing
(lenny) gets released, it serve as a new stable base for 64 Studio and
the regular 64 Studio users can upgrade as well.

It's just a pity that Debian is slow in releasing, and releases are
already old when they come out. From this point of view having a 64
Studio version based on Ubuntu would be cool IMO (please don't start
flames here!), but of course requires much work.

By the way did somebody check out the latest Ubuntu Studio? I didn't
have time to check it out it, but I would love to hear reports and
comparisons with 64 Studio.

  th> Just today's thoughts, really.

They're welcome!

Free