Ignorance and shrinking The Gimp-Perl

[Zbigniew Koziol]

Often, sending e-mail with questions to a mailing list causes that the
sender mobilizes himself to find out the solution of the problem by her
own way. I was finally able to install (possibly properly) the perl
extension to The Gimp. But frankly, I do not remember how I did that.

Anyway, I want to write these few words for reasons I am going to
explain.

I did go through http://gtk2-perl.sourceforge.net/ - that helped at
certain moment. I had to add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.config . It
probably helped too. BTW, why Linux installations would not have
/usr/local/lib in /etc/ld.config by default? Would that hurt?

What is my point?

Ignorance. Of users and developers of Linux software. This particular
perl module is certainly not documented and tested well (documentation
contains even misleading information). Sure, I am glad that the author
wrote it, spend a lot of his time on that work, make it available for
free use, gave the source code for free. But the most important seems
documentation.

Developers often do not document well their programs and environment in
which they tested them. Users, from another hand, when reporting
problems, do not care to write back and explain how they were able to
solve these problems (if they were able, and it is possible that in the
case of most of these usenet messages with questions, dingling out of
google, they finally were able to solve their problems).

So, just to raise that point, and provide my incomplete though
information about my way of solving the problem, I am responding again
to my own message.

In any case, I am happy that I can use Gimp as a Perl module. Will it
work? 

zb.


On Thu, 2004-08-05 at 16:28, Zbigniew Koziol wrote:
> I wrote happily a day ago:
> 
> On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 13:23, Zbigniew Koziol wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 13:02, Anton Markov wrote:
> > > For more info about Perl and The Gimp:
> > > <http://mmmaybe.gimp.org/tutorials/Basic_Perl/>
> > 
> > Great thanks for this info.
> > 
> > I have been using, till now, perl together with imagemagic, but it is a
> > bit non-trivial. Perl with Gimp must certainly be powerful.
> 
> But... there is a butt. 
> 
> Gimp-1.211 does not install on all systems so easy. It gives out a
> message like this, when running perl Makefile.PL:
> 
> FATAL: unable to deduce plugindir from gimptool script
> 
> A bit silly error. I looked to Google but could find only that others
> had the same problem often, while no conclusive solution seems to be
> known. 
> 
> Initially, I used all that with Gimp that has been installed with Fedora
> Core 1, discovering that it for some strange reason does NOT have
> gimptool around. But after that I installed the newest Gimp from
> gimp.org, and now gimptool is available. 
> 
> Anybody around by chance, could advice?
> 
> zb.
> 
> > zb. 


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