patch or not patch ?

[Havoc Pennington]

frederic heem wrote:
> As long as the libraries have been patched, configure with different options, 
> there is little chance they will binary compatible

This is untrue; distributions are pretty disciplined about not diverging 
their library API/ABIs from upstream. Historically dbus upstream has 
changed ABI, so distributions may have different versions, but once all 
distributions have dbus 1.0 you can expect the same API/ABI. dbus does 
not have configure options that change the API afaik, and if it did they 
would be for embedded use, not distributions.

> so if my application is 
> tested under fedora, there is no guaranty that is works under other 
> distributions. 

No kidding - welcome to reality. However, there are rarely problems for 
open source apps, since they get sucked into every distribution and 
managed by the distribution. For third-party binaries, yes it's 
virtually impossible to distribute one that works on an arbitrary 
distribution, at least one that depends on anything outside of a small 
LSB-ish least-common-denominator. And if you distribute in RPM format 
you need to use RPM as "just a tarball," i.e. avoid using dependencies 
and other things like that that may vary across distributions.

This is not something we can fix in the dbus project though, so we're 
getting a little off-topic.

Havoc