patch or not patch ?

[frederic heem]

Alle 16:38, lunedì 16 ottobre 2006, Thiago Macieira ha scritto:
> frederic heem wrote:
> >Another question is why redhat, suse and <put your favorite
> > distribution> have different spec, different /etc/init.d/dbus,
> > different dbus-daemon location etc.. Not even talking about debian &
> > friends...
>
> This is going off-topic, but it basically boils down to "they are
> different distributions".
>
> 1) The package names are different
> 2) The package split is different
That's a real pain that package names are different.  An application depending  
on libdbus has to modify its spec file to inform rpm about this dependence, 
so different packages names implies creating different spec for the 
application. Why waste some time and effort to create spec for every 
distribution ?

> 3) The compilation flags are different (some distributions optimise for an
> arch, some others don't)
> 4) The distribution's internal buildsystem and source-control for
> the .spec files is different (some distributions automate .spec and
> actually work on a level up from them)
> 5) Some distributions have -debug packages, others don't.
>
> The init system is different. The tools that handle them are different.
>
The suse init system is just a joke, there store script in different 
directory, any added value ? Just more incompatibilities ...  
Now that my application has to run as a service, I have to learn the redhat 
way, the suse way, the debian way etc ... 
I wonder what LSB says about this issue.
> >No one is adding value by making things incompatible, and it's real
> > burden for application developer.
>
> While I can agree with the first part of your sentence, I cannot agree
> with the second. How is it going to be any different for the application
> developer?
>
> The library behaviour is the same. And it's also source and binary
> compatible. The library is found (during development) via pkg-config.
>
As long as the libraries have been patched, configure with different options, 
there is little chance they will binary compatible, so if my application is 
tested under fedora, there is no guaranty that is works under other 
distributions. 

> >Why not building one rpm that can be installed on *all* rpm based system
> > ? Is it so difficult to agree between packager ?
>
> The D-Bus library and daemon are small enough and have few enough
> dependencies that they could be built as LSB packages. The bindings
> certainly can't (maybe the glib one, but I am not sure).
>
> But since we want D-Bus to be an essential part of the system -- as its a
> dependency for HAL, for instance -- distributors have to package it
> anyways. So we gain nothing in creating LSB packages.