[Mono-docs-list] running monodoc - Fedora Core 2

[Jonathan Pryor]

On Wed, 2004-05-19 at 21:39, Robert Foster wrote:
<snip/>
> Actually, changing libgtkhtml-3.0.so.2 to libgtkhtml-3.0.so works,
> provided that you have installed the gtkhtml3-devel package (which
> installs a symlink from /usr/lib/libgtkhtml-3.0.so.4 to
> /usr/lib/libgtkhtml-3.0.so).
> Might make it a little easier for the maintainers?

In this case, "easier for maintainers" == "harder for users".  We don't
want to require the installation of development packages just to use an
application.  This is what we previously did, and it generated a number
of complaints by people who didn't want to install 10's of MB of -devel
packages just to run a little app....

I would argue that libgtkhtml-3 is broken.  It's changed the major
version number of the library (2 => 4).  Such a change would break
normal unmanaged applications, as the .so name would be different.  This
may be because libgtkhtml-3 doesn't promise any API/ABI stability
guarantees, which is probably an even bigger issue.  Compare this to
libgtk-x11-2.0.so, which on RH9 is libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.200.2, and on FC2
is libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.400.0.  They have the same major version number
(0), so both managed and unmanaged programs won't break when upgrading.

The solution is to dump libgtkhtml-3 and use something else. :-)

Alas, this is a rather difficult solution, but long term I believe this
is where Gnome is headed, as they're not keen on depending on three
different HTML implementations (gtkhtml2 for yelp, Gecko for epiphany,
and libgtkhtml3 for evolution).  IIRC, long term is to migrate to Gecko,
but I could be wrong...

 - Jon