[Ardour-Users] Compiling Ardour ?

[Paul Davis]

On Sun, 2008-01-27 at 13:03 +0000, John Emmas wrote:
> The thing that hampers smooth, scaled changes in Linux is that it depends on
> lots of underlying technologies which are mostly being developed by private
> individuals working at their own pace and to their own timescales.  When a
> major component changes, at least some of the developers who depend on that
> component need to stop what they're doing and turn their attention to
> compatibility issues.  This in turn, can create further compatibility issues
> which result in the constant flurry of upgrades about which you first
> complained.  It's very different from the situation with Apple or
> Microsoft - where major changes can be kept "in house" until the company
> feels ready to release them.

I don't think this is really as much of a factor as you think. If you
(or a piece of software that you use) tracks the development version of
another package, then this is real issue and I think your analysis is
correct. But its not necessary to do this, and in fact most of the
notable Linux distributions don't do it either. I still run FC5 on my
dual opteron box, and the only reason I have for upgrading at present is
so that the stock version of rhythmbox would have cover art support :)
Fedora doesn't upgrade FC5 anymore, and even when they did, it wasn't to
track major changes in various libraries - that is what leads to FC6, 7
etc. As others have noted, and as I just did, you don't *need* to
upgrade.

With ardour itself, we have tried (in general) to avoid releasing
versions that require packages of other libraries that are way ahead of
where we percieve the current "norm" to be. This can be hard on people
who are running distros that are more than, say, 2 years old, since it
turns out that they really do need a newer version of libXYZ to run the
software. This doesn't seem out of the norm for me - there is a lot of
stuff on Windows that requires upgrades in this way. I still remember
when Win98 came out *without* USB support and then a later service pack
added it. Within a very short period of time, there was a flood of
software and devices that all required the service pack. I believe the
same is happening right now on Vista, with changes to the audio system
being required by more and more "Vista-native" pro-audio apps (at least,
thats what i recall the CTO of Cakewalk explaining). 

I do agree with you that if you watch the "raw level" of linux
development, that its looks chaotic, untimed and can be very hard to
follow. But this is what "distributions" are there to "hide", and its a
large part of why I originally switched to using a distro that had most
or all of the libraries I wanted/needed available from a repository
rather than requiring me to fetch the source (what source? which
version?) and build it.

--p