The Cairo operating system [LWN.net]

The Cairo operating system

Posted Jul 5, 2006 22:35 UTC (Wed) by evgeny (guest, #774)
In reply to: The Cairo operating system by farnz
Parent article: Cairo release 1.2.0 now available

> I'm still not clear what you're after; Cairo has the needed separation between backends and core library internally. They just haven't spent the hours needed to write dlopen() boilerplate code

Exactly, that's my point.

> especially since the backend interface isn't stabilised, and thus this boilerplate code would need plenty of changes.

I don't believe it. If the internal API changes, they still need doing practically the same amount of work, be it a direct linking or glued by dlopen. As far as the core and the backends are maintained by the same team, at least - which is the case now.

> You're still arguing that because your distribution of choice combines a lack of flexibility

NO! why don't you read carefully what I've said earlier? _My_ distribution of choice (Gentoo) is flexible enough to accomodate my needs, not to mention I'm pretty much content with compiling from the source tarballs. But this doesn't matter. What I care about are _users_ of my software, which is NOT specific to Gentoo, so if a sysadmin doing e.g. "apt-get install myapp" on a server will see about entire Gnome lib pack selected (due to the deps) plus the kitchen sink, he will (and rightfully so) say "No". That's what I'm afraid of. I don't agree to cut the number of potential users of my app tenfold because of the dumb Cairo architecture.

> Plus, as you've said yourself, who cares about a few bytes?

Now you're comparing apples to the oranges...

> Here's a constructive suggestion for you; if the dynamic linker isn't bright enough to cope with missing libraries (despite the fact that they're not used), why don't you motivate someone to fix this?

Huh? May I have a contr-suggestion for you: write about this idea to LKML or the glibc maillist, or better both. And don't forget letting me know - I want to enjoy the show ;-)

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