patch or not patch ?

[frederic heem]

Alle 17:41, lunedì 16 ottobre 2006, Havoc Pennington ha scritto:
> 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.
>
The problem is not related to API/ABI. A patch modify the behavior of the 
library, so if my app is tested with the default library, the behavior of the 
app may differ with the patch library. Ok, it's likely to work, the risk is 
present.
The original post is to kindly request to the fedora packager and the dbus 
maintainer to apply patches to the dbus source repository. That' all.

> > 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