Proposal to reduce anti-bundling requirements

[Neal Gompa]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 6:08 AM, Ian Malone <ibmalone at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 15 September 2015 at 10:11, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson <johannbg at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On 09/15/2015 08:41 AM, Ian Malone wrote:
> >>
> >> On 14 September 2015 at 16:47, Jóhann B. Guðmundsson <
> johannbg at gmail.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >>> They simply have welcomed their new container overlords and are using
> >>> only
> >>> the recommended upstream method for installing for their application (
> >>> pip,gem etc since developers can use the upstream support community for
> >>> those ) in those container images, followed by a strong attitude of use
> >>> it (
> >>> their produced container/vm image not some downstream shipped/provided
> >>> "package" ) or "take your freedom of choice and get lost, we are done
> >>> trying
> >>> to support and play the "X-factor of linux distributions" game. "
> >>>
> >>> And once the "market" has ( started ) taken a stance ( moving away from
> >>> downstream provided package of their components since it does not work
> >>> due
> >>> to the fragmentation in the linux ecosystem ) it's irrelevant what I
> >>> think
> >>> or you think or distributions think or implement locally beside
> providing
> >>> the underlying structure to run their application for the sole purpose
> of
> >>> being relevant as an platform for deployment ( which today is basically
> >>> any
> >>> distribution that ships systemd ).
> >>>
> >> Ultimately that is going to be self limiting, you can only do it while
> >> the most fundamental components are playing by the old rules. I can
> >> think of a few research software packages (in the sense of software
> >> packages, not fedora packages) which are so tied to particular
> >> underlying libraries that getting them to work in the same environment
> >> is a real pain (various ones that bundle underlying libraries and have
> >> their own setups that force that on the whole system because they
> >> can't even get linking right). Now you can containerise that, but
> >> eventually you are going to have to have containers within containers,
> >> and somewhere in there will be a piece of rotting software.
> >>
> >
> > It's self limiting with or without containers is it not? besides there is
> > rotting piece of software littered all across the software galaxy even in
> > Fedora so that's nothing new.
> > ( which is to be expected for a distribution that has more components
> than
> > the require manpower to maintain them properly, inefficient deprecation
> and
> > clean up procedures etc. )
> >
> > In the end containers wont solve all the world problems and there exist
> use
> > cases outside it just as it was with virtualization but at the moment
> it's
> > want the market wants.
> >
>
> What I mean is they're not a magic solution, and this approach is
> beginning to burn up the accumulated benefit of years of discipline
> over this stuff. Currently you can see the software that has problems,
> and an over-dependence on bundling libraries is often a sign that a
> project is a bit flaky, containerisation allows that to be hidden. It
> does have plenty of legitimate uses of course.
>
> --
> imalone
> http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk
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>

​I've already seen people use containers to do things like this, and use it
as an excuse not to make sure the code can gracefully handle newer versions
of dependencies when introduced. At $DAYJOB, I had to push hard for a
program we shipped to continue to not bundle in libraries because there
were people that thought it would magically make things work across
everything. Of course, that's not the case because while the interfaces to
the libraries we used were stable, the interfaces they used weren't
necessarily so.

Those kinds of things start showing up once you start bundling libraries by
default. And then what do you do? Do you keep bundling? Where does it end?
What about namespace conflicts with system versions? Do you alter the code
for all of them (as bundler did) to incorporate it? These are the kinds of
things that make it not a happy place to be...


-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!
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