Inter-WG coordination: Stable application runtimes

[Lars Seipel]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 08:53:57PM -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
> If you like the idea of always reinventing the wheel seemingly for no good reason, or just to use the latest flavored language of the day, then great.

Uhm. Exactly because I don't like my stuff breaking every three weeks I
choose libraries that live up to my expectation. This might involve
assessing the capability of an particular upstream to maintain their
stuff going into the future or just avoiding the "latest flavored
language of the day".

This whole issue is for upstream projects to solve. It shouldn't be
papered over in Fedora. Want stable libraries? Cool, then let's go build
some. Help upstream projects to maintain stable releases and to design
their APIs with an attention to stability in the first place.

Many projects already get this. It might be appropriate for Fedora to
document which these are to help Fedora users make an informed choice.

But just freezing libraries at some random version essentially creates a
fork which has to be maintained inside Fedora. Who is going to develop
programs specifically for Fedora? Most developers are targeting the
broader GNU/Linux type of system. Now think about Fedora supporting libA
at version x while Debian froze it at version y and SUSE at z. What have
we won?

Really, this should be solved in upstream projects so you can expect a
stable library API across distribution boundaries. Doing it in Fedora is
not actually solving the problem.

Lars