[Scribus] Announce 1.2.5 Release

[Craig Ringer]

Craig Bradney wrote:
>> While I was there I took a peek at 1.3.4 and saw some things like
>> optical margins that move closer to the familiar TeX world. But I
>> saw somethig that gave me pause. There was a time when any Open
>> Source program could be compiled from the sources using
>> ./configure; make; make install. Now each group is adopting a
>> new and unexpected build procedure. We face a new tower of babel.
>> Scribus is neat but it isn't my only program. I am reasonably
>> sure that 1.3.4 or any other new version can continue to be built
>> under make. And all a make procedure does is compile the
>> software. I see no compelling reason to change

That is because you are not the one who has to wrestle the miserable 
bastard of a thing called Autotools. It is widely used only because 
there have, up until now, been no viable alternatives. Craig Bradney 
converted Scribus over as soon as CMake was ready for use in Scribus - 
after the KDE folks moved over, I might add.

If you want Scribus to progress more slowly because everybody wastes 
their time and effort fighting the build system not doing real work, 
that's your option, but I think you'll be alone in that.

Remember that Scribus is also cross platform, unlike many OSS projects. 
Not only does it build on a variety of UNIXes, but it has to build on 
Mac OS X and Windows. Autotools is not your friend on Windows, let me 
tell you (from current excruciating experience).

>> not to---it puts an extra and for some an unexpected burden of
>> downloading and compiling yet another new packaging protocol.

Yep, I wish that wasn't required too ... but let's face it, how many 
times have you had to download automake versions until you can't stand 
it anymore to find the right one to build a project? Or upgrade 
configure on a system that REALLY doesn't feel like letting you? Or, for 
that matter, had to find an OLD ENOUGH version of configure and automake 
due to their major incompatibilities between versions?

At least CMake is civilized and easy to upgrade and it's only one tool, 
not three or four.

--
Craig Ringer