next level of freedesktop.org

[George Staikos]

On Thursday 17 July 2003 10:32, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> Is there utility in versioned package of common libraries ?
>     - zlib / libbz2
>     - libpng/jpeg/....
> or are these now static enough not to require it ?

  I think these are everywhere...  though some apps still link them in 
statically.  (You should see what Macromedia did to libjpeg in their binary 
flash player plugin.  It takes a debugger to see, but it's amazing how they 
took working code and broke it so badly.)

> The more politically charged question then becomes, how about glib ?
> Its already used in several components, or dependents of components,
> in all of the desktop projects, is it acceptable as an explicit
> platform library, or is the 'g' stigma value too high.  This would

   The g has no stigma problems.  The problem is having 3-4 different 
implementations of each type of container linked into apps, and even worse, 
having apps that use all those containers internally.

   If glib has to be required, then it should at least be a sufficiently old 
version that it is already available in binary form for all the platforms 
that these desktops support without requiring extensive hunting.  The common 
libraries that use it, should use it internally and provide C primitives in 
the public interface.  Then each desktop can wrap this in their choice of 
toolkit if desired.  It's not fair to make all desktops use one desktop's 
toolkit.

-- 
George Staikos
KDE Developer				http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc.		http://www.staikos.net/