Core-Dev application for Mario Limonciello (superm1)

[Mario Limonciello]

On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 19:57, Stefan Potyra <sistpoty at ubuntu.com> wrote:

>
> ok, however in this regard, I've got quite a heretical question to you:
> As far as I understand it, DKMS builds modules on the users system.
> Following
> that practice, I have a dream to get rid of libraries changing SONAMEs.
> Hence
> I propose an application, which also rebuilds applications on the user
> systems, and does so once a new library was found. What do you think of
> this
> approach?

I've been thinking about this a bit since you wrote this idea.  At a glance
it sounds like a great idea that would reduce overhead and maintenance of
packages, but now I think unfortunately this will have to remain a dream for
the forseeable future.  The thing is that the SONAMEs typically get bumped
for a reason, eg ABI changes.  Sure, a lot of cases the ABI bump isn't
relevant to the binaries that link to these libraries, but therre is no way
to cover all of the cases.  If you ignore this problem, and treat it as a
corner case, you still do have a problem of sometimes having to pull in a
lot of dependencies that wouldn't be relevant on most user's systems.

Could you imagine how much more CPU would be wasted if you had to pull in
the entire OOo build system because the freetype library had an SONAME
bump?  Maybe that example is a bit of an exageration, but I do think this
would cause a lot more cruft on user's systems than would be desirable.

There is an argument from server teams that are against DKMS because of
having to include a compiler on their servers.  Luckily, DKMS doesn't pull
in more than just kernel headers in most cases which is much more acceptable
for desktop systems.

Regards

-- 
Mario Limonciello
superm1 at gmail.com
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