Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 15:31 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
In reply to: Fedora opens up to bundling by xtifr
Parent article: Fedora opens up to bundling

> There is no excuse for bundling ever, period, end statement.

You haven't developed for Windows (hell, even OS X for that matter) have you? Sure, for *nix, this makes sense, but that's not the end of the world.

I work on some apps that bundle, but they provide "use system version?" options for all but one or two of them. That's the better half-way point, but it's not perfect (and much harder than just plain bundling since you need to mangle symbols so as not to conflict with other bundled copies of the same library).

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 17, 2015 5:25 UTC (Sat) by cas (guest, #52554) [Link] (1 responses)

> You haven't developed for Windows (hell, even OS X for that matter) have you?
> Sure, for *nix, this makes sense, but that's not the end of the world.

The fact that it's common in Windows is not an excuse. certainly not a good excuse.

It's annoying in the Windows world, too. I have a win7 box which exists solely for the purpose of running Steam games, and I've bought several hundred steam games over the years. It's extremely annoying to have to go through the nvidia physx installer and Direct X installer and C library installer etc etc etc for almost every single one of those several hundred games.

It's worse than annoying, it's just plain stupid. I already have system copies of all those libs (and more) - i don't need or want more copies, or even to waste time while the installer figures out I don't need yet another copy in the game's own directory.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 17, 2015 17:29 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

You didn't read the rest of the post did you? We support building against system versions, but requiring users to go and find 20 libraries (with dev environments…that all agree) on Windows is an undue burden for everyone involved. OS X isn't that different. So we ship the code ourselves with options to use your own copies (which Linux distros use).

> It's extremely annoying to have to go through the nvidia physx installer and Direct X installer and C library installer etc etc etc for almost every single one of those several hundred games.

These really are "system" libraries in the sense that they should be provided there (like OpenGL backends on Linux).

> I already have system copies of all those libs (and more)

Yeah, but what about OpenSSL? Boost? Qt? Python? There's no standard place to put them that doesn't become hell once more than one app thinks they know how things are supposed to work gets it wrong. And the Windows store certainly isn't going to provide such things.