next level of freedesktop.org

[Havoc Pennington]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 12:28:30PM -0400, George Staikos wrote:
> 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.)
> 

One possible benefit to trying to deal with these is to synchronize
version jumps; historically, in one instance GNOME and KDE moved to a
newer libpng at different times, and that caused a fair bit of mess
for Linux distributions (and ABI incompatibility across
distributions). So if we coordinated the libpng upgrade as part of a
"desktop platform release" I can see it helping with that scenario.

Not sure this outweighs the downsides - in particular, I'm not sure we
should include things in a release unless they are actually maintained
on freedesktop.org, some feeling we should point people to the
official download sites for these things.

Havoc