[NTLUG:Discuss] Ximian™

[Richard Cobbe]

Lo, on Wednesday, December 12, Aaron Goldblatt did write:

> > Anyone used this?  Feedback about it?
> > http://www.ximian.com/index.html
> 
> I've used Ximian's Gnome, although I didn't get to Evolution.
> 
> I liked it but found some trouble that made it sort of hard for me to deal 
> with, so when I trashed the machine and went to Suse 7.3 (from RedHat 
> 7.2), I went with stock gnome.org Gnome instead.
> 
> My issues were basically with Red Carpet, Ximian's auto-installer thingie, 
> and its interface with RedHat.  I found it slow and sometimes unreliable 
> in doing its updates.  It never actually broke the machine, but having to 
> try an update three or four times was irritating.

I also use components of Ximian GNOME: I don't much care for the
desktop---fvwm all the way---but I do use some of the apps (primarily
gnucash and gnumeric).

My experience with Ximian updates suggests that the speed problem is not
in Red Carpet but rather Ximian's servers---I use the native Debian
packaging system to do the updates, and Ximian's servers are
consistently much slower than Debian's.

In general, I like it, although the quality of the Ximian packages is
somewhat less consistent than that of the Debian stable release.  In
particular, the inter-package dependencies aren't as carefully
maintained as I would like.

Now that I've got some spare time, I'm going to investigate upgrading to
Debian testing, which has native packages of most of the stuff that
I use from Ximian, and I can get the rest from Debian unstable.

> Also, it could apparently only do rpm --upgrade, and not install
> multiple versions of a single library.  There is an update to
> libgtkhtml out there, and that upgrade removed a previous version upon
> which gnucash 1.6.4 (the current version) depended.  If I allowed it
> to upgrade, it would automatically remove gnucash too.  It was really
> strange.

I've not experienced this problem, although again, the Debian Red Carpet
really isn't much more than a graphical front-end to dpkg and apt-get.
Since apt-get has dist-upgrade, which will install new dependencies
automatically, Red Carpet pretty much just uses that.

Actually, I have the dual problem: since the upstream maintainer of
libgtkhtml changes the soname pretty frequently, I've ended up with
about five copies of that library installed, and only two of them were
actually in use.  Some quick work with dselect took care of that,
though.

Never tried Evolution: I'm too used to the Emacs keybindings to ever
want to use another mailer.

Richard