Tuesday, January 27, 2009

How to handle dependencies

Recently, Notecase Pro became dependent on a GtkSourceView library in order to implement syntax highlighting and a few other cool features.
Slight problem is that the program requires at least version 2.4.1 of this library, because it fixes a crash when the library needs to display a picture inside the note.
The problem is that many distros still offer the old versions of the library, for example Ubuntu is still stuck at 2.2.2 which is not good for us.
Windows installer for Notecase Pro comes with this library already prepared for you, so there is not problem there.

To resolve the problem on Linux, you need to compile this library by hand. Here are the steps (adapted for Ubuntu):
  • download the library sources (see website link above) and unpack them
  • open the terminal application and go to the sources directory
  • execute these 3 commands: "./configure", "make", "sudo make install"
Note that if you are missing some dependency for the library, you'll get notified in the configure phase. In that case, install the required dependency and repeat the 3 commands written above.

Once the GtkSourceView library is installed, you might need to install the notecase .deb with force option (because you didn't install the .deb for the GtkSourceView library - because it
doesn't exist).

To do this, from the directory with notecase .deb file execute this command (again from within the terminal application):
"sudo dpkg --install --force-all packagename"
(where packagename is the name of the notecase .deb file)

That's it. Now your Notecase Pro should work fine.

4 comments:

mumblyjoe said...

From your web page: "NEWS: This project is now discontinued, the last version being 1.9.8. Read more at my blog."

This is curious because - according to your blog - you're still developing. Do you mean that you've suspended development until the GtkSourceView issue has been resolved? Or are you really planning on ending development for good?

Adriatic said...

I had two project Notecase (free and open source) and Notecase Pro (commercial).

Free project is discontinued in order to concentrate on the Pro version.

Pro is very much alive :)
As I get more users participating, I got quite many new ideas for the future development.

Anonymous said...

It is a shame you are discontinued the open source version. You should continue to release the open source version on GNU/Linux platforms (maybe even the pro version) and just sell the commercial version for other platforms. You can still ask for donations from the GNU/Linux user base.

Adriatic said...

It is never that simple as you might imply.
Working on a single program requires quite a lot of effort from my side. Working on the two programs in parallel proved to be exhausting for me.

And the donations were quite low (almost non-existent, thanks for the few exceptions) in the 4 years I've been working on the free version.

Try to look things from my perspective too.

Thanks for the comment.