Fink and unmet dependencies

[davidnix71]

I used Fink Commander to download and install AbiWord 2.2.7 on my G4 Powerbook. When I tried to run it, it wouldn't load and Xterm gave a whole page of errors. The first was about Pango and the rest about GTK libraries. After installing Pango, AbiWord started, but the splash screen was a blank white box and again there was almost a page of errors. After installing GTK+ and GTK+2 AbiWord started without errors.

If AbiWord is using the Gimp Toolkit, why isn't that included with the base files? I left a bug report with the SourceForge, but as a previous poster there noted, all the bugs are assigned to "nobody" and none have ever been answered or resolved. Does that mean AbiWord is abandonware?
If Sun is sold to IBM, who knows what will happen to OpenOffice, besides OO is waaay to big to download on a slow connection.

[worker201]

Were you not aware that AbiWord was dependent on gtk/pango?  Crazy.  Even crazier is that fink didn't seem to be aware of this.  Bah fink.  I've switched to macports, and find it much more satisfying.

AbiWord no longer has corporate sponsorship, and is being run totally by independent developers.  They're probably too busy to worry about fink packages.  Considering that (outdated) OSX binaries are available just makes it less likely that they will get around to dealing with it.  You could volunteer to take over the fink spot, if it's important to you.

[davidnix71]

I used FinkCommander to download and install AbiWord. It said it was checking dependencies. If I use an apt-get utility I expect it to get all the parts, not just some. When I got FinkCommander it said up front that I needed X11 and Fink installed first and gave the proper links and instructions to get them. I already had X11 for the Gimp and OpenOffice. This should have been a no-brainer.

I had to guess from the error log what was missing. Pango was easy, but the errors related to GTK sounded like someone was taking shortcuts substituting dependencies. One error said there was an improper attempt at reparenting a process and gave a url where it said was an explanation on how it should be done. The failed splash screen was the giveaway that AbiWord was using the Gimp to add graphic capabilities to itself. I had thought of AbiWord as just a plain old text editor and not like MS Word.

I don't think it's FinkCommander's fault, it's just a gui for Fink. A dependency check should be straight forward. You don't hear of missing DLL's in Windows anymore. Everything is packaged complete.


Neat. I just got Porticus and MacPorts. Lots of stuff. It calls all over the place during install, but it works fine.