Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 2:55 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313)
Parent article: Fedora opens up to bundling

There's a huge difference between bundling a private copy of a shared library (the famous zlib example) and bundling a library for which there is not shared library version (the rawspeed library that started this mess)

If the library is not packaged as a shared library, it makes no sense to demand that users of that library convert it.

It also makes no sense to make the exception being for programs that can't link against system shared libraries, because any program can make that claim with a trivial fork of said library.

Let's face it, most of the time when libraries are bundled it's because they have been changed slightly from the upstream version and the change hasn't been merged (and a large percentage of the rest of the time it's because the upstream version won't maintain a stable API)

Let someone package rawspeed as a system shared library, then you can fuss at other programmers to use it instead of bundling their own version. But demanding that a project (or the maintainers of a project) turn a library that they are using into a shared library is going too far.

This looks to me like someone was overreaching trying to force 'unbundling' too much and the push has backfired on them and now allows far more bundling than is reasonable.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 3:12 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (2 responses)

I agree with this as well. If a shared library exists, use it; if no shared library exists, don't force upstream to change that (potentially *causing* ABI problems if the "library" doesn't provide a stable interface).

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 15, 2015 12:04 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (1 responses)

> I agree with this as well. If a shared library exists, use it; if no shared library exists, don't force upstream to change that (potentially *causing* ABI problems if the "library" doesn't provide a stable interface).

This is basically the new policy in a nutshell.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 17, 2015 20:56 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

hmm, the article paints a very different picture.

and the terminology used seems point make an exception based on the convienience of the project using the library.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 5:24 UTC (Wed) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (3 responses)

That makes sense, but the flipside of that is that if you're going to try to rely on libraries that don't have a shared version, and you're going to bundle them, all of a sudden, that library is now *your responsibility*! You're now responsible for any bugs. Or security holes. Congratulations.

You might as well just incorporate the code into your own and stop calling it a library.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 6:15 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

> You might as well just incorporate the code into your own and stop calling it a library.

that's effectively what people are doing, except that there are other people who are modifying and enhancing a portion of your codebase. some of those updates you take. others you don't (at least not right away)

Remember that in some cases, the people writing the code are only releasing source, they aren't creating or shipping a shared library.

Expecting an app developer to first turn a pile of code into a shared library, then finding someone to maintain it for the distro (including said bugs and security holes), before they can use it for their app is NOT less work.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 15, 2015 7:10 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link] (1 responses)

> That makes sense, but the flipside of that is that if you're going to try to rely on libraries that don't have a shared
> version, and you're going to bundle them, all of a sudden, that library is now *your responsibility*!
> You're now responsible for any bugs. Or security holes.

If you feel really responsible for your application, this can also be a good thing:
you can now fix bugs, or security holes, instead of having to rely on others (the distro or library maintainers).

Alex

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 15, 2015 8:04 UTC (Thu) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]

Absolutely! I've actually done this, with small libraries. But, as I say, I don't really consider it bundling.