[Scribus] Scribus 1.3.4 in Ubuntu amd64 repositories

[Craig Ringer]

John R. Culleton wrote:
> On Monday 06 August 2007, Craig Ringer wrote:
> 
>> There should be no need to build Scribus from source. You can if
>> you like, but it's probably nicer to use packages to do the job.
>>
> One of the strengths of Linux is the ablility to go forward and 
> backward thorugh versions of a package by downloading tarballs and 
> copiling them.  Packaging systems just get in the way, as the instant 
> case clearly illustrates.

It depends on the user.

I do agree that for some users and some tasks this is important, and I
do occasionally find it annoying that package management systems tend to
make downgrades difficult.

In general, though, 99% of the time I just want the latest stable
version. The key word is stable - it only works if the packaging choices
were good and the packages are properly tested. That's where the issue
under discussion arose.

If you want to track a given app/library manually, use multiple versions
in parallel, etc, then it's easy to build from source and take care of
yourself. For the vast majority of packages - which I just want to WORK
so I can get on with doing useful things rather than wasting time
fiddling with my system - a package manager is magic.

Thankfully, package management and manual software installs coexist
quite nicely thanks to good 'ol /usr/local. Properly packaged libraries
will increment the soname when an incompatible release occurs, so there
should be no upgrade breakage. I'm occasonally annoyed by the inability
to demand that the package manager simply leave obsoleted library files
on disk, but that's the only problem I have.

> I use Slackware and often the packages in the latest Slack 
> distribution are behind the latest stable release.  Using a source 
> tarball or its equivalent to upgrade is my usual practice, whether it 
> is Scribus (not included in Slackware BTW) TeX (I use the annual 
> TeXLive distro) Inkscape or whatever.  I would not want to be limited 
> to what happened to be available in a  Linux packaging system, 
> Slackware's or anyone else's. 

Sure ... but you're not limited by using a package management system.
You can always go outside it, but within its domain you save a great
deal of time and hassle.

As someone who uses Linux in my job, and who likes to spend spare time
doing productive development on (currently) PoDoFo or out windsurfing,
I'd rather just "apt-get install kde-desktop-environment" or
"xserver-xorg" than suffer though the builds. (Yes, I know about and
used to use Konstruct).

My point is that users' needs vary. In this case, the user's needs are
rather closer to mine ( "I want it to just work and work now" ) than
yours ( "I'm happy to fiddle with it to make it just how I like it" )
and I don't think a source build should be their first choice, even
though it's not a challenging process.

--
Craig Ringer