Proposed: libpcre

[Brad Hards]

On Sun, 1 Aug 2004 15:18 pm, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Maybe this points out that the freedesktop.org platform should be
> limited to things that need to be shared for interoperability and/or
> consistent user experience across apps.
Serious question: what does "consistent user experience mean"?

> If app A uses one regexp library and app B uses another, that really
> doesn't impact either interoperability or user experience, other than
> the fact that one regexp lib may be higher or lower quality.
Does slightly different regexp syntax meet the needs of a consistent user 
experience?

> I don't think freedesktop.org should be in the business of blessing one
> implementation detail vs. another. The point here is interoperability
> and avoiding the negative user impact you get from e.g. multiple MIME
> systems.
I think that this is a dangerous line of reasoning. In the extreme case, why 
do you want any X libraries? 

> But there's another line that may be relevant: fd.org platform should
> potentially only include packages that are actively part of the fd.org
> community. So e.g. this would exclude libpng.
Who is the target audience for the fd.o platform? Who is going to install it? 
Who is going to use it as a prerequisite? If you think it is for developers, 
we probably need to make sure it meets developers needs.

> I don't know that these lines are right but we really have to have some
> lines to avoid including "any package that looks useful"
That would still be better than shipping a tarball that isn't useful.

Brad