Adding Requests to the standard library [LWN.net]

Adding Requests to the standard library

Posted May 4, 2015 10:55 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Adding Requests to the standard library by paulj
Parent article: Adding Requests to the standard library

Oh, and referencer is a free software app, with source. I spent 1.5 days going through it trying to update it to match the gnomemm → GLib/GTK+ changes (URI and GVFS stuff that moved to a 'similar but not quite the same' API in GLib), and still hadn't really made a dent of what was left. So I gave up and went with Zotero. That seemed less worse than relying on an app that needed fiddling with manually extracted old libs to keep running (and I'm happy with Zotero now).

ABI compatibility on desktop Linux - at least in the GNOME world - isn't even a joke.

to post comments

Adding Requests to the standard library

Posted May 4, 2015 11:05 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (8 responses)

Oh, and I don't "blame" the GNOME people per se. It's sort of a wider failing. That the GNOME people have also been looking at doing their own distro-agnostic, package bundles suggests this too.

We need to get to a point where distros can guarantee forward compatibility. If a package installs on distro version N, it should install on all N+M, M>0.

Or, distros need to shrink to a core, and we look at higher-level ways of installing packages. As many of the programming languages already do for their library ecosystems - each differently though.

Adding Requests to the standard library

Posted May 4, 2015 14:33 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (7 responses)

> We need to get to a point where distros can guarantee forward compatibility. If a package installs on distro version N, it should install on all N+M, M>0.

That's backwards compatibility. Forwards compatibility is "compile on N+M and run on N". *That* is not possible without versioned symbols and something to tell the linker to blacklist certain versions of symbols so that only specific ones are used. The solutions here[1] are way too verbose and finicky for sane maintenance (so you just end up building on Debian Etch'n'half and hoping for the best).

Adding Requests to the standard library

Posted May 4, 2015 14:34 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Oops, forgot the link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8823267/linking-agains...

Adding Requests to the standard library

Posted May 4, 2015 16:09 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (5 responses)

Uh, yes, I mean backward compatibility.

Point being, if you can't take (say) a package for SpiffyDistro 16 and install it on SpiffyDistro 20, you don't have a system that is going to be generally useful for computer users - because it isn't stable enough for vendors to target it. It might be useful for some niche subset of users.

It doesn't matter how it's done, through containers or what not, but that needs to work, if todays distro model is to survive.

Adding Requests to the standard library

Posted May 4, 2015 18:01 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

The thing is that excluding things that depend on "Desktop Environment" libraries, most apps and their libraries do continue to work on newer versions of a distro (and are pretty trivial to get working on different distros), there are a few notable exceptions (openssl, Python 3.x changes are a couple of noticeable ones), but overall things work well.

It's when you have things start tieing in to the Desktop Environments that things are more 'interesting'. Unfortunately this does include a large percentage of GUI apps, but not all of them, some GUI toolkits are more stable than others.

Adding Requests to the standard library

Posted May 4, 2015 18:16 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (3 responses)

Again, which libraries are you talking about? libgnomemm vanished from Fedora because something lower down its build chain no longer built and nobody was willing to maintain it. The old binaries will still install.

Adding Requests to the standard library

Posted May 4, 2015 19:04 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

So why don't Fedora ship them then, if it's so easy to ship old libraries?

The end-user experience is that a perfectly good application disappeared.

Adding Requests to the standard library

Posted May 4, 2015 19:09 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

It didn't build, and packages that don't build end up getting removed.

Adding Requests to the standard library

Posted May 4, 2015 19:36 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

To be clear, I'm not arguing that this isn't a problem, just that the fault doesn't lie with the library authors.