next level of freedesktop.org

[Havoc Pennington]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 06:51:51PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote: 
> As far as I know, the libpng issue is caused primarily by the fact that:
> 
> a) libpng is not parallel installable
> b) ELF has old-skool symbol scoping rules.
> 
> (a) can and has been tackled, as the rather interesting tangle in my
> /usr/lib directory shows. It should have been done upstream of course,
> but perhaps in future freedesktop.org can be used to hammer out
> "emergency specs" for similar upstream oopsies.

I spent a lot of time talking to the libpng maintainers on the
parallel install issue, and they wanted to help, but there was a
communication gap; the result is that it's kind of parallel
installable and kind of not and basically just really confusing.
I probably could have done a better job explaining things.
 
> On the other hand, there's a reason that a lot of desktop Linux stuff
> has such fast release cycles, and that's simply because there's a lot of
> catching up to do with the competition, a lot of stuff is kind of broke
> (where "not standardised" often means broke imho) and so on. I don't
> think it doesn't really make sense to pick an arbitrary point and say
> "This is our platform for the next X years" when things are still moving
> so quickly.

I'm not thinking X years, I'm thinking more like every 6 months, for
releasing a set of libs such as dbus, fontconfig, etc.

Havoc