Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Banning modification of pkg-config files

[hasufell]

Rich Freeman:
> On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 9:00 AM, hasufell <hasufell@g.o> wrote:
>>
>> Our philosophy states that our tools "should be a joy to use". If we add
>> random hackery on stuff that affects portability across distros, then
>> this doesn't hold true anymore.
>>
>
> Which one of our tools is at risk of not being a joy to use?

Gentoo in general as a _development platform_. I'v also seen people
arguing "this library isn't used by any package, let's remove it". Not.
A. Reason.

>
> It sounds like the impact is to upstream developers who use Gentoo not
> realizing that a library they depend on doesn't actually provide a
> pkg-config file across all distros.  How large an issue is this in
> practice?  It sounds like somebody will build something which works
> fine in their testing, and then somebody will get a compiler error on
> some other distro and report it, and then they can take 2min to fix
> their build system once and for all.
>

The impact is on users as well if they try to build software with a
broken build system.

> What solutions do we have?  Obviously we should try to get upstream to
> change, but when they don't I don't see a universal policy that makes
> sense.
>

We are effectively spreading the philosophy of modifying interfaces,
libraries, headers and other things that are not trivial (and with one
of the pkgconfig file additions in lua... we also got a library rename
that breaks dlopen. So this is just the first step.).
This has at first almost no effect on others, but for us, get's a lot of
"shit" done.
Longterm, this makes it year after year more difficult to develop
software for "Linux". Instead (like valve), people start to develop for
certain distros only (like Ubuntu), because it's just too much work to
bother with all this hackery-here-hackery-there-incompatible-here
things. Maybe also a reason they start to bundle all libraries for every
single game (among the convenience factor), effectively decreasing
security overall.


> So, while I agree that the current state isn't ideal, I'm not sure
> that it is any worse than the alternatives.
>

As described above, it is definitely worse.

TBH, I don't want to be part of a "get shit done" distro. I could simply
switch to debian then and do all the funny "lolpatches".

I was hoping that QA is the authority that separates "get bugs fixed"
from "get shit done".