Linux binary compatibility

[Thomas Leonard]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 07:51:52PM +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-02-28 at 19:05, Thomas Leonard wrote:

[ bogus -lpangoxft from pkg-config ]

> > Great, another binary-compat problem fixed :-)
> 
> This time .... I can't babysit people forever. A part of the autopackage
> developer guide is dedicated to binary portability. I want to flesh it
> out and perhaps split it off into a separate book. 
> 
> Do you think it'd be worth collaborating on such a guidebook and hosting
> it at freedesktop.org?

If they'll have it (I expect so; CC'd). It seems that a lot of these
problems could actually be fixed upstream, though, rather than just
written about.

For example, instead of doing

LDFLAGS = `pkg-config --libs gtk+-2.0 | sed 's/-lpangoxft-[^ ]*//'`

in every program's Makefile, we could just modify pkg-config to not
include it in the first place, at least on platforms that can cope with
dependant libraries automatically, like Linux.

Perhaps apbuild should be hosted on fd.o?

> By collaborating I mean getting you to help write it by the way :)
> bincompat R&D is draining a lot of our time and mental energy at the
> moment.

As always ;-) The problem seems to be more one of attitude: people
*expect* Linux binaries from one system to fail on other Linux systems.

Anyway, if you stick it on the Wiki, everyone can help out!


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk	tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
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