How to best deal with bundled libraries

Patrick W. Barnes nman64 at n-man.com
Mon Apr 6 07:50:36 UTC 2009


On Monday 06 April 2009 02:15:54 Matej Cepl wrote:
> On 2009-04-06, 02:37 GMT, David Nalley wrote:
> > 1. Patch source to point to the library installed on the system
> > rather
> > than the bundled
> > OR
> > 2. symlink from the bundled location to the system library.
>
> Ask Java folks ... some applications have even Sun JRE included
> in the release tarball (ehm, Openfire ;-)) but IIRC (and I am not
> a Java maintainer), the option no. 1 is The Right One.
>
> Thinking about it, it looks to me like you are de facto replacing
> Requires interface between packages with symlink, which seems to
> me like a bad proposition.
>

I agree that option 1 seems like the best.  I would add that we should work 
with upstream to make sure that include paths are not hard-coded throughout 
the app and are instead managed in a central location (per-app) that can be 
easily changed by installers or packagers.  I have seen a number of PHP 
webapps that completely fail in this regard.  Another thing to watch out for 
is apps that modify the included libraries, sometimes without mentioning it in 
documentation.  PHP's low barrier to entry results in a lot of ugly things.

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Patrick "The N-Man" Barnes
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