Coders Edge

   
  
gthumb:  
  Stick a Fork in it

 When is an 'upgrade' not really
   an upgrade?  Try gthumb 2.11 and see.

  Could anyone have imagined that
the awesome tool gthumb could be
so thoroughly and completly destroyed
by an 'upgrade'?  It is like what
happened to KDE some years ago:
suddenly the 'upgrade' made things 
not work.

  The 2.11 gthumb was so bad . . . 

  How bad was it?

  It was so bad that Ubantu decided
to recind the upgrade and revert to
a 2.10 version.  gthumb 2.11 was so
different from 2.10 that it didn't
even use the same keyboard mappings:
mappings that had been in use for over 
6 or 8 years (I have used this program
since at least 2004).

  What to do if you have this horror
in your distribution?  Get the code
for the 2.10 version and compile and 
install that.  First you need to 
remove the 2.11 version.  This is easy
in FC13.  Do as follows at a command 
line:

> sudo yum remove gthumb

That will remove the so-called upgrade.
Next you need to get the code
for gthumb.  I found it on line in a 
tar-zipped file.  I downloaded the file,
untarred it, CD to the directory
of this code, run configure,
then do a make install.
You need to use sudo to do this.

After that I have gthumbs the way that
I like it.  And I seriously think 
that I will keep a copy of this code
so that I don't get forked in the future.
And I don't mean fork as in make your
own branch.  But that is what I will
do unless the gthumb is made
to be even similar, at all, to what it 
was before (for many many years.)   

  WP. 11:25 PM June 8, 2010