Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 25, 2010 21:38 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136)
In reply to: Applications and bundled libraries by mikov
Parent article: Applications and bundled libraries

> 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.