[maemo-developers] External Repository and HAM

[From: Tor]

[on the issue of libraries]
On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 23:04, Graham Cobb <g+770 at cobb.uk.net> wrote:
> The situation is completely different in a desktop distribution.  Ubuntu,
> Debian, etc. include massive numbers of packages -- pretty much anything you
> could need and certainly anything that two apps developed by different people
> are likely to both need.

Yes. It's rare not to find the library you need in the standard distro.

> Maemo has no such goals.  The base system includes only what is needed for the
> Nokia apps.  The community provided portion only includes things ported by
> someone who needs them for their own app.  In my experience as a Maemo
> developer, every time I want to create or port a new app I have had to port
> at least one library from Debian.  So, it is almost certain that anyone
> creating an app in an outside repos has to port at least one Debian app.
> Meaning it is not at all unlikely that two outside apps have both ported the
> same library.

But this is also a problem even when using a shared repo. App A needs
library K and installs App A and library K in the shared repo (say,
Extras). Then another developer comes along and develops App B, which
also needs library K. Now, library K was built and provided by the
first developer, which built it as ./configure --with-biscuit-only
because that served the needs of App A. App B, however, needs that
same library but with ./configure --enable-tea.

How to resolve this? Ideally, library K should now be taken over by
some maintainer (who could be one of the two mentioned, or someone
else), but this time built as a universal library with all features
enabled, useful for all developers.  The good thing about a shared
repo here is that at least the issue comes to a head quickly. Do we
have procedures for handling this?

Marius Vollmer wrote:
>To be fair, libraries do not _need_ to be shared, sharing them is an
>optimization.

True, but this is very inefficient on small-memory devices. It makes a
huge difference to have, say, 3 applications sharing a library instead
of having 3 copies in memory instead.

-Tor