Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 16:37 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: Fedora opens up to bundling by hkario
Parent article: Fedora opens up to bundling

Sure, they support stability by never changing anything, only carefully backported fixes, with limited provision to run applications from different API levels at the same time. Extending support for bundling or containers or just multiple versions of libraries on the same system would be more do-able if there were some sort of agreed-upon target. We could make a hypothetical Linux-ABI-2012 run on the same kernel as Linux-ABI-2016 with the ability to mix and match user applications on the same system, if we had those things defined in any kind of sensible way. The way this is being done now is with containers, which has its own downsides.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 16:49 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (8 responses)

There's a reason the LSB has all but died (https://lwn.net/Articles/658809/): nobody actually seems to care, and nobody actually writes to that ABI.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 17:45 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (7 responses)

That's because LSB took a wrong approach - it tried to standardize too much and achieved too little. And its toolkit is also complicated to use.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 18:23 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (1 responses)

They tried to standardize enough to allow useful applications. Applications often use a huge number of libraries and system functions. Standardizing a half-dozen libraries will not suffice, and POSIX does not suffice (especially for non-command-line apps).

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 14, 2015 18:36 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Yes, and it didn't work out. For example, they'd added Qt4 just at the time it went into the EOL lifecycle stage.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 17, 2015 13:32 UTC (Sat) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't see it as trying to standardize too much, but I agree that they took a wrong approach.

In my opinion, the mistake was to standardize on what was already shipped, instead of specifying what should be shipped.

Basically catering to the wishes of the distributors instead of the needs of the developers.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 18, 2015 2:41 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

> In my opinion, the mistake was to standardize on what was already shipped, instead of specifying what should be shipped.
That's an even deeper mess. Now a committee will have to design API for the future, without feedback from actual developers. This only leads to pain, suffering and the original POSIX specification.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 18, 2015 8:56 UTC (Sun) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link] (1 responses)

Right now the situation is closer to what you describe, i.e. specifying without input from developers.

Instead of providing something that developers would want to develop against, they choose to specify something that distributors are automatically in compliance with.

Of course that is great for marketing, but rather useless for engineering.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 18, 2015 9:13 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Committees are notoriously bad at listening to developers. Most of the successful standards of the last years simply standardized the existing best practices. C++ is a good example of this.

LSB should have realized that the GUI toolkits in Linux can't be standardized, except at the lowest level (X-server or Wayland). And as for the startup system and configuration, LSB tried to be as flexible as possible to accommodate all distributions, so it ended up less than useful for all of them.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 22, 2015 9:39 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> In my opinion, the mistake was to standardize on what was already shipped, instead of specifying what should be shipped.

> Basically catering to the wishes of the distributors instead of the needs of the developers.

Sort of yes ...

They shouldn't have standardised on what was shipped, they should have standardised a way of describing what was required...

I tried to get them to do that - the example I give is I wanted to create an LSB virtual package that would pull in the components required by WordPerfect. That approach would have been great - an app developer just specifies the pre-requisites and leaves it to the distro to ensure they are met.

What's the point of describing what's there, if there's no way of prescribing what's needed?

Cheers,
Wol