| I think that this is a fairly serious issue that deserves attention by
everyone.
I know that some developers here like to install the latest versions of
their development tools soon after they are released. But there are
considerable disadvantages to doing so for the rest of the community
including not just the aggravation of other developers who have not updated.
In addition, users who try to compile Csound are forced to update many other
components in addition to Csound. Users who merely try to install Csound
may run into library incompatibilities (particularly on Linux). Packagers
for Linux distros run into the problem of their distros not having the
latest versions of Python, FLTK, libsndfile, or what not. (Many distros
seem to be quite conservative in this regard, and many users may be using a
distro that is 2 or more years old).
I have suggested before that the requirements for compiling and using Csound
should be set to older versions of Python, FLTK, etc., not to whichever
version the developers happen to have installed on their machines. I know
that this can inconvenience developers, but it is a solid approach for the
distribution of any software that desires to be widely and easily used.
(Just look at how many pieces of software are still being released with
minimum requirements of Windows 95 or 98. Unfortunately, the opposite trend
has been occurring with MacOS X -- everything requires 10.3 or 10.4 -- and I
find this extremely frustrating).
For myself, I am still targeting MacOS 7.5 -- released more than a decade
ago -- even though I use 9.1. And I use Python 2.2 to compile the Python
stuff (I should probably try 2.0 to see if it works). If libraries are
written and linked correctly, then software that links to older libraries
should generally work with newer ones as well. This is a "win" for
everybody.
Anyways ... that is my opinion on the matter ...
Anthony
jpff wrote on 1/4/07 4:33 PM:
> I finally managed to build most stuff on the machine; I had to
> compiler swig 1.3.31 from source and install and that seemed to fix a
> number of issues. If we really need the latest cutting edge SWIG it
> really ought to be tested for.
>
> I still have the lack of declaration of numBuffersInput in
> frontends/fltk_gui but I suspect that is a side effect of fltk1.1.7
> not building on x86_64; again that needs to be tested for if we require
> the latest version.
>
> Yes I know I am being grumpy(*) but i have wasted hours on this.
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