CentOS - May 2009 - Upgrade GTK2 from 2.10 to 2.12 ?

Hi,

I'm using CentOS 5.3 on all my desktops, and I really like it. Now I'd 
like to build a few additional apps that aren't included in any third 
party repo. Some of them require GTK2 2.12 to build, so I'm considering 
a (careful) upgrade of this package.

General question: 1) how "safe" is it to upgrade this package? To do
so,
I'd use an SRPM from Fedora. 2) What could I possible "break" on a
vanilla CentOS install by doing this?

Cheers from the sunny South of France,

Niki Kovacs

--- On Wed, 5/27/09, Niki Kovacs <contact at kikinovak.net> wrote:
> Some of them require GTK2 2.12 to build, so I'm
> considering a (careful) upgrade of this package.
> 
> General question: 1) how "safe" is it to upgrade this
> package? To do so, I'd use an SRPM from Fedora. 
> 2) What could I possible "break" on a 
> vanilla CentOS install by doing this?
Niki, what would be those applications? I personally find GIMP 2.2 as "too
obsolete", and this is because some algorithms are improved in GIMP 2.4
(no, I don't need GIMP 2.6, which is btw somewhat buggier).

OTOH, I've found on the forums that GIMP 2.4 would build with GTK+ 2.10.13,
whereas CentOS 5 comes with GTK+ 2.10.4 only :-(

See: 
http://centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=11086

As a personal opinion, I suppose Firefox might be the first to be affected by a
GTK+2 upgrade, as it seems quite fragile.

Stupid question: would it be possible to build those applications (e.g. a newer
GIMP, for instance) with STATIC builds of some newer libs, y compris gtk2? This
way the newer libs shouldn't be used by anybody else, so they shouldn't
break anything, right?

Cheers,
R-C



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Niki Kovacs wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm using CentOS 5.3 on all my desktops, and I really like it. Now
I'd
> like to build a few additional apps that aren't included in any third
> party repo. Some of them require GTK2 2.12 to build, so I'm considering
> a (careful) upgrade of this package.
>
> General question: 1) how "safe" is it to upgrade this package? To
do so,
> I'd use an SRPM from Fedora. 2) What could I possible "break"
on a
> vanilla CentOS install by doing this?
Try it out and see what happens.. since the version change seems
pretty minor I wouldn't expect too much breakage .. Though to be
on the safe side it's probably good to install it to another
directory(/usr/local or something) and change the package name so
it doesn't conflict.

When building your new programs just be sure that you point them
to the other version of GTK via LD_LIBRARY_PATH CPPFLAGS etc..

nate