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Fedora opens up to bundling

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 6:33 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Fedora opens up to bundling by pabs
Parent article: Fedora opens up to bundling

Debian and Fedora both have an interest in unbundling. Other distros probably do too. They might collaborate in some cases by maintaining a fork or patchset to some upstream programs (a bit like the old ooo-build) which unbundles libraries and perhaps fixes other practices which make software harder to package. This semi-fork would then become the upstream for Debian, Fedora, probably Ubuntu and RHEL etc.


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Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 15, 2015 2:21 UTC (Thu) by prometheanfire (subscriber, #65683) [Link] (1 responses)

Ya, gentoo looks down on it. Maybe it's a good idea to get the distros together on this.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 17, 2015 6:09 UTC (Sat) by dirtyepic (guest, #30178) [Link]

They pretty much already are. I don't see any distros clamoring for more bundling.

Gentoo does strongly discourage bundled packages but it's usually not something that would keep a package out of the tree. There's a couple examples where we compromised and let the user make the decision themselves of whether to use the bundled code or the system library, the most notable being Firefox where there are such options for system cairo, icu, jpeg, vpx, and sqlite.

I think there's one advantage of distro unbundling that software developers overlook. By building your package against system libraries we often find bugs and incompatibilities in those libraries early. When the time does come for you to update your bundled code to a newer version those bugs, that would have cost you valuable time and manpower to debug, test, and fix have already been resolved upstream. That means fewer local patches for you to carry around and less divergence from the upstream code, making it easier to backport any future bug fixes, etc. etc. Just as often we find bugs or incompatibilities in your package and can also get them fixed early, or at least make you aware of them.


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