Comment 3 for bug 1457651

I don't understand the two bullet items ("vala runs at make dist time (before configure)" and "You detect your gee version at configure time.") How do we compile the vala sources before we've generated the Makefile? Or do we compile to C without using a Makefile?

I've created a patch that selects gee-1.0 (the old library) or gee-0.8 (the new one), and likewise chooses between gtk+-2.0 and gtk+-3.0, based on what's installed on the host system. I'd guess that this is at least necessary, if not sufficient, for this task. I've tested it on Debian 7 (which has the older libraries), Debian 8 (which has the newer libraries), and CentOS 6 (which has the older libraries.)

I think we will also need to update the package repositories to reflect that moonshot-ui will use libgee-0.8 and libgtk+-3.0 in those distros where they're available, so that apt-get buildep moonshot-ui and yum build-dep moonshot-ui will use the newer libraries where appropriate. How do we do those updates?