Gnumeric 1.4.2 Released

Gnumeric is pushing the envelope of technology constantly. We have found bugs in several OS kernels, X servers, C libraries, glib, gtk+, and more other libraries than you can shake a stick at.

Oh, and in Pango too. Rotating a right-justified pango layout does vnot work right. (In fact, simply meassuring it is what fails.) that bug was fixed only after Pango 1.8, so really it won't work.

It is however not a problem in term of compatibility of the whole desktop, I've just misunderstood what's the problem against building from cvs (if you want test last release's features).

I admir gnumeric development, it's just the better free sheet for importing excel, the best in function list, rendering is a "missing" feature now, and I hope that with next release gnumeric can push cairo technology too.

great work.
(page size is not so bad and a lot related to font and friend ... but you know, it's not perfect)

Gnumeric works just fine with older versions of pango. It also has somewhat lax depends for gtk+, and only requires 2.4 rather than 2.6. However, if you want rotated text to work, you'll need the latest and greatest pango. Older versions of pango either did not support rotation (1.4.x) or had bugs measuring rotated text (1.6.x).

No offense but if you're able to build the release from source you should also be able to build pango (it really doesn't have many dependencies), even if it's from cvs.
Else you have to wait for packages anyways ...

- rob

Yes, I should be able to build pango. It only depends on pkg-config, glib, gtk+, xft2 and a few other, iirc. However, when I last tried (Feb. 2004, attempting to build inkscape or sodipodi), the dependencies weren't even listed, and I spent two full days trying to hunt them down.
The maintainer of www.pango.org doesn't respond to emails, even though he advertises his address there. When I asked a GNOME developer at last year's CeBIT exhibition where xft2 (or was it another one of the prerequisites? I'm not sure) could be found, he said: "But that's part
of the X server." The fact that not the whole world uses one and the same X server (and a current version, too) seemed to be news to him.

And have you thought of the meaning of "stable"? What do you think is the reason for many development teams advising against the use of current development versions for "production releases"?

Rainer Brandt

Rainer,

* if you have questions, always post to the ML, not the maintainer
* if you don't want to mess with dependencies at all and still try bleeding edge stuff use garnome, jhbuild or a similar tool

- Rob

OMG stop trolling man.

And stop do as if you were stupid too.

When you do not know anything about a project (and even when you do but bump on an issue), in a gnu environment, you have at least two files to read : the README (there is a reason it is called readme) and INSTALL files.

All the info you are searching for are in this file, at least for pango. And Pango only depends on glib to compile. To be useful, you would use xft2 or fontconfig on Linux.
You say you know how to compile from source and you don't even know that you should read at least the README, that is pathetic.

And learn to read correctly, you need cvs pango if you want *to use rotated text*. Compiling this version of gnumeric DO NOT REQUIRE a cvs pango. So yes, it needs a stable release of pango, and if you want unstable features, you can use as of now, unstable releases.

Of course I read README and INSTALL.
Do you?
I was giving an example. The example was building inkscape and its
prerequisite libraries in January and February of 2004. At that time,
the required information wasn't in those files. Go check the repositories.
My problem was to find the libraries and to find a set of versions
that worked together. I couldn't find xft2 after searching the
GNOME and Pango web sites, even Google didn't help. I eventually
found it at http://pdx.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/releases/,
but it wasn't easy because the other web pages at freedesktop.org had
no reference to xft2.
I started with the latest stable versions of each library released at the time and worked my way up the chain of requirements
until I reached a library that wouldn't compile because it required
something newer than a stable release. When that had happened four
or five times (each time further along the chain of requirements),
I gave up because I ran out of time.
The facts I gave are correct, and I don't believe I was impolite.
Sorry if my criticism hurt you, but I don't accept the label "troll".

Please consider this: Assume a user has GNOME 2.0 or 2.2. Further assume he's not using Linux and he's not using an i386 or compatible
architecture. Will he be able to build stable releases of GNOME
architecture?

Rainer Brandt

Sorry, I meant:
Will he be able to build stable releases of GNOME applications?
Rainer

Sorry,
I didn't mean to remain anonymous.
I wrote that comment.
Rainer Brandt

more information might be a good idea,
detailed description of the problem, perhaps a screenshot of the bad behaviour, the details of which Gnumeric version, which platform, hardware (including printer if this is a printing problem).

and if you are going to file bugs against Gnumeric (that are not Debian specific) it would probably be best to ask on the Gnumeric list and file you bugs in Gnome Bugzilla http://bugzilla.gnome.org

It sounds like you reported this to the Debian bug tracking system. You would probably have more luck reporting it to bugzilla.gnome.org under Gnumeric. They do read and fix bug reports filed there. Printing in particular has seen some big fixes lately, but if you have some test cases showing how things break, submit them as attachments and the Gnumeric guys will take a look for sure.

Gnumeric's core developers do tend to check the bugs reported against gnumeric in Debian; an extreme case in point was a build failure with gcc 4.0 which was fixed in CVS even before I had time to reproduce it properly.

Still, if you know for sure the problem is one with gnumeric in general rather than the result of something I did, the best things is to report it to bugzilla directly.

In locales that seem to use d/m/y gnumeric sets the default formats to use that ordering. To use them in other locales you'll need to use a custom format

Thanks for your answer, I'll give it a go.

Simply add a Custom format "dd/mm/yy". I'm not sure why this isn't included by default...

Um... always been there for me!

great ctrl+f work again instead damn F7 :)

what about:
** (gnumeric:621): WARNING **: Unable to load key '/apps/gnumeric/printsetup/center-horizontally'

** (gnumeric:621): WARNING **: Using default value 'false'

** (gnumeric:621): WARNING **: Unable to load key '/apps/gnumeric/printsetup/center-vertically'

and so..

Are you using Fedora Core 3 by any chance?