Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 17, 2015 19:33 UTC (Sat) by lsl (subscriber, #86508)
In reply to: Fedora opens up to bundling by NAR
Parent article: Fedora opens up to bundling

> The (other) problem is difference between distributions. Ubuntu LTS has boost 1.54, SuSE has 1.49, debian jessy has 1.55 - now which version shall I use in my application?

None of the above. Use a sane library that offers a proper interface and keeps it stable across releases. Then you can pick the feature set of the oldest version you want to support and it will continue to work on all later versions.

Even if all distributions had the exact same version of boost, that wouldn't solve your problem. When boost version n+1 gets released and included in distributions, your stuff would still break unless someone commits to maintaining old boost versions indefinitely. Distros won't (and can't) do that with an upstream that is as hostile to backwards compatibility as boost.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 21, 2015 16:12 UTC (Wed) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link] (1 responses)

... is the correct answer. The problem isn't just applications, it's libraries not offering long term stable API guarantees. This is sloppy, lazy programming.

Fedora opens up to bundling

Posted Oct 21, 2015 17:43 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

...except for applications that take libraries, mangle them in incompatible ways, and bundle the results. (Chrome/chromium was the most infamous example of this, though I understand they have considerably cleaned up their act in recent years)