Uniting to get upstreams to use system libraries

[Colin Guthrie]

Andreas Jaeger wrote:
> Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> [...]
>> I'd like to know if other distributions also consider separating
>> libraries from applications to be a best practice.  If so, would you be
>> willing to collaborate on getting upstreams to see our point of view?
> 
> Please contact the
> opensuse-packagers mailing list (see lists.openSUSE.org for info) to
> reach out to the package maintainers for colloboration,

Well it's the point of this mailing list to reach various 
representatives of different distros. Emailing each distro list 
separately kinda defeats the point of having a distributions mailing list.

Just to go with the flow, this is very much the Mandriva policy too!

I know that some packages do this for reasons of versioning, e.g. they 
rely on an older version of a library (old major).

If this is the case then the distro should be capable of packaging two 
different majors of the same library and allowing dual install. I know 
the Mandriva packaging policy allows for this situation and is very 
clear on what to call the package etc.

Other programs (one example being MythTV) make some significant changes 
to their libraries (ffmpeg) and/or use their own version to cut down on 
the external dependencies. For me dependences are our job, and 
application developers should not worry about that, but this opinion 
simply wont float in the MythTV community where the devs have come under 
some flack for the number of external dependencies they require and the 
difficulties users have in building it. Changing the minds of MythTV 
will be pretty hard. This is just an example of a project I am familiar 
with, I'm sure other projects that do similar things will have their own 
reasons too.

So while I think this is an important topic, I'm not quite sure what can 
really be done about it other than just pestering people on IRC and 
mailing lists ;)

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
   Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
Open Source:
   Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/]
   PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
   Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]