Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 7:55 UTC (Wed) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988)
In reply to: Fedora opens up to bundling by Cyberax
Parent article: Fedora opens up to bundling

> Who cares about bundling? I say, bundle the whole world and to hell with distributions. Bundle everything above syscalls: ditch glibc for musl, jettison distro-provided libraries, get rid of complicated packaging.

In other words, everyone needs to be their own distribution?

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 8:12 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Yep. Turns out it's much easier than supporting many rapidly changing distributions. I wish the tools for bundling were better, though.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 8:34 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

And when you actually think about it, supporting a mini-distro for your own single application is pretty trivial.

The most complicated part in a real distro is forcing all the different software packages play together nicely. You sidestep this whole mess, since you usually care only about just one app. You also don't need the startup/shutdown infrastructure and all the thousands packages for all of the free software.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 9:52 UTC (Wed) by hkario (subscriber, #94864) [Link] (1 responses)

and yet, how many ruby applications (which basically never use system provided libraries) depend on old versions of libraries for months at a time?

developers have already proven that they are not capable and do not care enough to provide good support for bundling, be it in form of direct source bundling or container images

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 14:57 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> and yet, how many ruby applications (which basically never use system provided libraries) depend on old versions of libraries for months at a time?

There is nothing within a distribution's power to fix ruby so that it's trivial to upgrade without breaking anything.

There is not enough manpower in the distribution to rewrite ruby to make it 'sane' and there is not enough manpower to package every possible version of every possible library needed by ruby applications and maintain properly.

If you want to make a distribution that forces developers to 'behave' you are going to behave then it's going to have to prevent people from using any ruby/python/java/C/C++/etc application that isn't pre-packaged by the distribution. Doing this will effectively make the OS worthless to the majority of people.

The reality is that if you want to run your applications on Linux you can't depend on distributions to provide everything you need. Linux distributions are not capable of providing all things needed.

> developers have already proven that they are not capable and do not care enough to provide good support for bundling,

This is not necessarily a issue that rests entirely with the developers. The fact that installing and maintaining software on Linux is such a huge pain in the ass that they don't have the time to deal with it is a big issue as well.

I think the solution to these problems is to see how people want to use the OS and then make it easy for them to do so. For example: provide tools that makes it easy to install software from upstream and maintain those installations without forcing everybody to go through distribution repositories. Security concerns should be addressed not by forcing everybody to use distribution-provided dependencies, but by having tools that analyze software and look for library versions and other things that are known issues. You will never be able to create a 'perfect' solution to these problems, but you can provide a realistic one.