[Scribus] GSView under Debian

[Oleksandr Moskalenko]

* jrm at kw.igs.net <jrm at kw.igs.net> [2006-06-12 15:28:57 -0400]:

> Hi.  If I am off-topic here (i.e, if there is a better  
> way to reach people interested in GSView on Debian than  
> by this list), then I hope someone will politely let me  
> know....  
>  
> Are others successfully using GSView under Debian? 
>  
> I'm using it, but with problems.  I got it by putting an RPM  
> file through Alien, and am using GhostScript libraries that  
> I've generated from the gs-afpl sources. 
>  
> The major further hurdle is font management -- I haven't 
> sorted out the right way to register GSView with the Debian 
> font management programs, so my GSView is not finding out 
> about new fonts as I install them, and for some reason my 
> GSView doesn't act very nicely when it doesn't have needed fonts. 
>  
> There is also the minor issue of arranging that GSView show 
> up properly in Debian and KDE menus.  (Being from an RPM, maybe 
> it does show up in Gnome menus, I wouldn't know.) 
>  
> Is there any hope that debian.scribus.net could have packages 
> for libgs (which would be a virtual package provided by 
> libgs-afpl and libgs-gpl) and for gsview? 
>  
> Regards, 
>   
> --  
> John (MacPhail)  

John,

It's not really off-topic as far as I can tell. One of the core Scribus
developers Peter Linnell made several requests for the gsview/libgs Debian
packages as well. There has been a certain level of interest in this
combination for a while, but no sustainable solution has been found, yet. I
personally have made several attempts of packaging libgs/gsview for Debian and
every time I ran into a wall of my incompetence when building the shared
objects (what you call libgs) from the Debian ghostscript sources (afpl or
gpl). I tried contacting the Debian gs maintainer several times, but did not
have any luck as he seems to be inactive and his packages have been NMUed
(uploaded by unrelated people to fix bugs) for a while now. Regarding your
problems with font management and menu inclusions - those are solvable much
easier than the libgs builds. If you think we could could work together to get
that done I might be able to prepare packages that would correctly integrate
into a Debian/Ubuntu system.

Regards,

Alex.