Re: [Plib-devel] Creating shared libs or plib under Linux

[Hans de G. <j.w...@hh...>]

Bram Stolk wrote:
<snip>

> But first: what is the exact reason for you wanting to have shared libs?
> Do you want to package multiple plib games for a distro and need to spare
> the redudancy?
> 

We already ship multiple plib games and plan to package more in the
future. It isn't about sparing the redundancy in terms of diskspace, let
alone the very theoretically lower memory usage when running multiple
plib using games at once (who would want to run multiple games at once).

There is only one reason for wanting shared libs and thats a very good
reason: with shared libs if a bug is found in plib (and no piece of code
is bugfree) we only need to release an updated plib package which the
fixed shared libs and all plib using programs / games will magicly pick
up the bugfix.

The other scenario requires me (the plib maintainer) to poke everyone
who maintains a plib based package todo a rebuild and requires end users
to download many updated games instead of a single update.

This is only one reason but a _very_ important reason. Actually one of
the things I as a packager (and others) spend quite a bit of time on is
to remove copies of library-sources from sources as distributed by
upstream. You have no idea how many times upstream developers think lets
make it easier for end users to compile this and drop copies of
libraries they need into the source tarbal. I think before we started
cleaning things like this up an average linux distro had atleast 30
copies of zlib in its source archives, until the zlib security bugs
started hitting us, scrambling out 30 security fixes which should have
been just 1 is no fun (at all). Now the zlib scenario was even worse,
because the packages did not only need a rebuild but all those separate
copies needed separate patching first!

So now most distros (atleast Debian and Fedora) try to avoid this as
much as possible. Debian has been shipping a plib patched to build .so
files for ages, Fedora hasn't been shipping plib for long and fixing
this has been on our todo from day one.

Just to make things clear the question isn't if Fedora is going to be
shipping shared libs for plib, the question is if this is going to be a
patch on top of plib which we will have to maintain for as long as we
ship plib or if this can be integrated upstream. Where I ofcourse prefer
getting things integrated upstream.

Regards,

Hans