Upgrading MATE on Tribblix

I spent a little time yesterday updating MATE on Tribblix, to version 1.26.

This was supposed to be part of the "next" release, but we had to make an out of sequence release for an illumos security issue, so everything gets pushed back a bit.

Updating MATE is actually fairly easy, though. The components in MATE are largely decoupled, so can be updated independently of each other. (And there isn't really a MATE framework everything has to subscribe to, so the applications can be used outside MATE without any issues.)

There's a bit of tidying up and polish that helps. For example, I delete static archives and the harmful libtool archive files. Not only does this save space, it helps maintainability down the line.

Builds have a habit of picking up dependencies from the build system. Sometimes you can control this with judicious --enable-foo or --disable-foo flags, sometime you just have to make sure that the package you don't want pulled in isn't installed. The reverse is true - if you want a feature to be enabled, you have to make sure the dependencies are installed first and the feature will usually get enabled automatically.

That's not always true. For example, you have to explicitly tell it you have OSS for audio, it doesn't work this out on its own.

I took the opportunity to make everything 64-bit. Ultimately I want to get to 64-bit only. This involves a bit of working backwards - you have to make all consumers of a library 64-bit only first.

A couple of components are held downrev. The calculator now wants to pull in mpc and mpfr, which I don't package. (They're used by gcc, but I drop a copy of mpc and mpfr into the build for gcc to find rather than packaging them separately the way that most of the other illumos distributions do.) And pluma wants gtksourceview-4 which I don't have yet. This is related to the lack of tight coupling I mentioned earlier - there really isn't any problem having the different pieces that make up MATE at different revisions.)

You stumble across bugs along the way. For example, mate-control-center actually needs GLib 2.66 or later, which I don't have yet (there's another whole set of issues behind that), but it doesn't actually check for the right version. Fortunately the requirement is fairly localized and easy to patch out.

That done, on to another set of updates...