[haiku] Re: Haiku gcc2hybrid and software for gcc4
- From: Ingo Weinhold <ingo_weinhold@xxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:35:54 +0100
On 2009-11-07 at 02:46:01 [+0100], David McPaul <dlmcpaul@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 2009/11/7 scott mc <scottmc2@xxxxxxxxx>:
> >>
> >> It is this entire concept of ported packages that think they need to
> >> be installed in a common place that I am against.
> >>
> >> I have been developing and more importantly using software for over 25
> >> years and applications really do not share a lot of libraries and even
> >> if there is some library not provided by the OS that is so common
> >> between applications it is simply not critical that it be placed in a
> >> common location.
> >>
> >
> > You'd be surprised how many apps rely on some very common libraries.
> > Take for example
> > openssl, libxml, freetype, expat, libiconv, these are currently
> > available as Haiku optional packages and many programs depend on
> > these.
>
> When a library becomes usefull, it gets added to the OS.
>
> Indeed, I think openssl for example is not an option but mandatory.
> If a library is not considered good enough to go in the OS then an
> application developer that needs it can add it to their folder.
A lot of libraries will be useful (at least to some group of users), but we
probably don't want to "add them to the OS". Examples include toolkits like
Qt, GTK, wxWidgets, or even X11. Including the respective libs in every
app's folder is simply a no-go.
> > Perhaps with the large sized hard drives available these days
> > these libs could be rebuilts and included with each application, but
> > that sounds like a lot of extra work that I don't want to spend time
> > doing.
>
> It is not your work to do. It is the application developers work to
> include the pre-built library.
And with Scott being the most prolific porter over at HaikuPorts, it
actually would be his work to do.
> > Now image if one of these dependency libs had a critial
> > security flaw that needed to be updated, we'd then have to track down
> > the 4 or 5 locations it's been installed on the system and changes
> > them all. If you have vlc, netsurf and a few other programs you just
> > might have 3 or more copies of various versions of libiconv.so
> > floating around your system already, since those programs included it
> > in their own folders.
>
> The application developer would have to update them and inform the
> user, the OS developers just need to update the OS libraries via the
> standard OS update channel.
That's quite a burden you'd pose on the application developer. I'm pretty
sure that this wouldn't work in practice. Besides it multiplies work, since
every developer needs to do that for every of her package's using the
library, instead of just the Haiku maintainer of the library.
CU, Ingo
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