Reinventing bundled libraries?

Posted Sep 2, 2014 10:01 UTC (Tue) by fmuellner (subscriber, #70150)
In reply to: Reinventing bundled libraries? by aquasync
Parent article: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

No, the idea is that all GNOME runtimes are provided by the GNOME project, so all applications that target the same runtime version will actually get the same runtime (e.g. GNOME_3_24). GNOME would likely pick a distribution to compose the runtimes, but that is irrelevant to the application - for applications, all that matters is that there is a single "vendor" for GNOME runtimes (likewise for KDE, Enlightenment etc.).

Reinventing bundled libraries?

Posted Sep 2, 2014 11:10 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (4 responses)

I wonder - is it really feasible to produce a distribution-neutral GNOME/KDE runtime? Will the same binaries run on different kernel/glibc combination? I have doubts...

Reinventing bundled libraries?

Posted Sep 2, 2014 13:36 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (3 responses)

The runtime would include all the components of a distro that gnome needs to run. There is no problem running many distros with their own libc on the same kernel because Linus is a stickler for ABI discipline.

Reinventing bundled libraries?

Posted Sep 2, 2014 14:02 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (2 responses)

So it means that the GNOME project will provide the libc? Because the parent comment says that GNOME runtime will be provided by the GNOME project. This would make the distributions redundant - which might not be a bad idea...

Reinventing bundled libraries?

Posted Sep 2, 2014 15:43 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

You are right, what I said didn't sound right, I re-read the proposal and there are several levels which are related so this is better abstracted. So you have a root filesystem which is unique and you can have several of these, they depend on a /usr filesystem which is from a distro and is shared and is a dependency of various runtimes which are shared infrastructure that apps depend on, additionally you have frameworks which are the devel libraries for building apps against. I'll have to read through again but it might also be that runtimes are supposed to be able to run against multiple different /usr distros but that doesn't seem possible because the ABIs of the /usr are different.

Examples taken from original article

root:testmachine:org.fedoraproject.WorkStation:x86_64
- usr:org.fedoraproject.WorkStation:x86_64:24.9
  - runtime:org.gnome.GNOME3_20:x86_64:3.20.5
    - app:org.mozilla.Firefox:GNOME3_20:x86_64:40
root:bar:org.archlinux.Desktop:x86_64
- usr:org.archlinux.Desktop:x86_64:302.7.10
  - runtime:org.gnome.GNOME3_22:x86_64:3.22.0
    - app:org.libreoffice.LibreOffice:GNOME3_22:x86_64:166
    - framework:org.gnome.GNOME3_22:x86_64:3.22.0
home:lennart:1000:1000

Reinventing bundled libraries?

Posted Sep 2, 2014 15:56 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Actually I'm wrong in that the runtimes are mounted at /usr, and need to be at least complete enough for everything in the runtime to work as well as any app which depends on the runtime, so it seems to me that runtimes will also have to be full distros or based on a full distro.