On Dec 18, 2013, at 6:08 AM, Lars Seipel <lars.sei...@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 -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
