Is there any advantage to build xfce in one distro over another?

skink · 2018-10-20 16:17:14

I was dipping my toe into the XFCE world by trying to build Thunar last night. It has a number of unmet dependencies. I'm currently on Devuan (Debian without systemd). I know Debian is slow to update things, but the exo library available in the repository is 5 minor revisions ago, and Thunar was like 2 years ago, right? Also, a number of dependencies just aren't available through Debian at all.

I'm wondering if I should just give up on the package manager and follow the build instructions for the whole thing: https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/building, which probably involves downloading and installing everything individually to keep up to date. I hate doing that. It usually ends badly.

OR, should I consider a different OS. The ones I would consider at the moment are Devuan, Void, DragonflyBSD, and OpenBSD. I might even go back to Mint, if it were that much better to build things.

I'm wondering if this is a common problem and if people can make some recommendations based on experience so I don't have to load these OSs one by one just to try to build XFCE & associated programs.

ToZ · 2018-10-20 16:37:18

Hello and welcome.

Arch has the AUR which has git versions of many if not all of the Xfce packages (see: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&K=xfce+git). Makes it somewhat easier to build and maintain as it is tied into the package manager through PKGBUILD scripts and dependencies are accounted for.

Edit: In some cases you may want to use the devel packages if the git package is tied to a specific commit.

Last edited by ToZ (2018-10-20 16:41:21)

skink · 2018-10-20 22:41:36

Thanks. Do you think this is also going to be true for the various Arch derivatives like Manjaro & Antergos?

ToZ · 2018-10-20 23:00:28

Possibly. I don't have much experience with any of them. In theory, they can also use the AUR. Some of them have their own repositories that add to the base Arch-provided repositories, and these may have some additional packages. For example, Manjaro has https://osmirror.org/manjaro/stable/extra/x86_64/.

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#1 2018-10-20 16:17:14

Is there any advantage to build xfce in one distro over another?

#2 2018-10-20 16:37:18

Re: Is there any advantage to build xfce in one distro over another?

#3 2018-10-20 22:41:36

Re: Is there any advantage to build xfce in one distro over another?

#4 2018-10-20 23:00:28

Re: Is there any advantage to build xfce in one distro over another?

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