[Monotone-devel] Re: bundled libs

[Markus Schiltknecht]

Hi,

Daniel Carosone wrote:
> Add pkgsrc, for this as well as other reasons; while I understand the
> original desire with bundling code, especially where we depended on
> our own fixes, the general preference amongst most packagers would be
> to let them use their own dependency resolution.
>
> Apparently, gentoo also (link found in today's Gentoo Newsletter):
> http://blog.flameeyes.eu/articles/2008/01/21/and-what-about-imported-libraries

So, isn't the question right now: shall we continue to maintain our own 
copy of those things at all? After having tested a --with-system-botan, 
I find it surprisingly easy. While with the current included approach, 
I've had to struggle even for the update from 1.7.2 to 1.7.3.

Maybe a complete inclusion, 1:1, running the library's provided 
configure script and all would solve that issue. But then again, one can 
certainly ask, if the distribution's packet system isn't doing a much 
better job in that - including security updates and all.

Of course, testing with different botan, sqlite and pcre libraries 
doesn't come for free. And maybe, one day we need to differentiate 
between certain versions of these libraries or drop support for old 
versions. But hey, that's a well known process to pretty much everybody 
involved.

Thus I'm voting for removing the "false positive" saying about "not 
requiring any dependencies" and migrate to "builds on top of well known 
and tested 3rd party libraries". Because I think the former makes one 
ask "are they really going to build everything from scratch?".

Agreed, for a new user it's a bigger hurdle, if he has to install other 
libraries first. However, most package systems cover that pretty 
automatically. And reducing the build time by not requiring to build 
every library for static inclusion is also great, IMO.

One can also argue, that if a distribution doesn't ship a library we 
need, then it would help monotone if we didn't require it externally. 
But not shipping the library is a deficiency of the distribution, not 
one of monotone. So why not fix it right there?

Regards

Markus