On Dec 18, 2013, at 6:08 AM, Lars Seipel <lars.seipel(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.
Thanks for the response.
Is it really upstream causing the problem in the first place? Or is it the distributions,
who have always selected what library versions they will package, while also proscribing
packaged libraries in applications, along with the insistence that it's the
distribution package maintainer who decides what ships, not the developer?
I don't think you get to fully blame this lack of application portability on linux on
upstream. The distributions make choices that are motivated, I'd like to think, by
what's best for their users. But in so doing, they also have caused a kind of
fragmentation that makes the distributions effectively proprietary, and as different as
Windows is to OS X. The one commonality they share is the name of the kernel. It's
actually quite disconcerting for people new to "linux" to find out the extent of
mutual incompatibility that exists. Again, I don't think that's any upstream's
design goal. Conversely, differentiation is a design goal for distributions.
Chris Murphy