Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 19, 2010 18:02 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Applications and bundled libraries by mikov
Parent article: Applications and bundled libraries

if you look at the LSB, I believe that you will find that the GUI libraries are not part of it's specs.

to post comments

Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 19, 2010 18:12 UTC (Fri) by mikov (guest, #33179) [Link] (1 responses)

Isn't that exactly what I am saying? The LSB is not adequate to solve
the problems to which bundling is perceived as a solution. Neither is
distribution package management.

Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 25, 2010 21:38 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

> The LSB is not adequate to solve the problems to which bundling is perceived as a solution.

Why not? The whole point of the LSB is to have "libraries by default in the OS", and to have an unchanging ABI for those included libraries, just like they are with Windows or Mac OS X. (That is, for a single version of Windows or Mac OS X, at least, since the API/ABI has changed between releases.) An application compiled for the LSB can depend on those libraries without bundling them with the application, and any other libraries must be bundled with the application (which can be done by linking it statically, or can be done by putting the library in a directory under /opt and then setting RUNPATH or RPATH to that directory). This is essentially what developers of apps for Windows and Mac OS X must do already.

In short, your proposed solution for Linux to include "libraries by default in the OS" exists, and it's called the LSB.

Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 19, 2010 18:48 UTC (Fri) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Yes, they are. Both Qt4 and GTK2 are part of LSB. See http://refspecs.linux-foundation.org/LSB_4.0.0/LSB-Desktop- generic/LSB-Desktop-generic.html.