[Portland] Current plan summarized

[Ian Murdock]

On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 17:03 +0100, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> On Wednesday 22 March 2006 14:42, Ian Murdock wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-03-16 at 20:40 +0100, Kevin Krammer wrote:
> > > ISVs usually don't use package dependencies at all. They either link
> > > statically or ship the shared library as well.
> > > Unless it is part of some kind of standard like LSB.
> >
> > That's why the ultimate goal is to get Portland into the LSB, so ISVs
> > can know with certainty whether the runtime support is there without
> > the need for static linking or bundling the shared libraries or thinking
> > about fallback scenarios etc.
> 
>  It's a question whether fallback scenarios can be avoided, because this is 
> not about systems but desktops. If the user runs TWM, the app may be out of 
> luck.

A user running twm is hardly the common case. I'd suggest we focus on
the common case first.

> > If it's in the LSB, ISVs can use it 
> > knowing it will work out of the box on LSB compliant systems,
> > which means every major distro they're likely to care about today.
> >
> > I still have this nagging feeling we're making this more
> > complicated than it needs to be. What is being done in the DAPI
> > library that couldn't otherwise be done with a set of
> > scripts?
> 
>  Anything that doesn't fit description "dead simple"?

Such as? I'm looking for a specific use case here. My gut tells me the
common case is "dead simple", and Jeremy's perspective as an ISV seems
to confirm this. We should come up with a solution for the common case
first, then turn our attention to the hairy edge cases that add 95%
of the complexity, rather than trying to tackle the hairy edges first.

> > With a script based approach, you don't have to worry 
> > about ABIs at all, and trust me, if there's a way to do this
> > without having to worry about ABIS, you want to go that route.
> 
>  Feel free to, nobody's stopping you (how many more times will I have to 
> repeat this?).

Are we writing code for the sake of writing code, or are we trying to
solve a problem the ISV community has brought to our attention? I'm
simply trying to provide some insight here, as someone who isn't
an ISV himself but who spends a fair amount of time talking with
them, as well as someone who spends a fair amount of time talking
to the people we have to convince to ship this (i.e. the distros).

-ian
-- 
Ian Murdock
317-863-2590
http://ianmurdock.com/

"Don't look back--something might be gaining on you." --Satchel Paige