On Tue, 2014-05-13 at 18:56 +0200, Sandro Mani wrote: > Hi, > > apitrace 5.0 bundles libbacktrace, which looks like is living within the > gcc sources. libbacktrace is not build as a shared library from the gcc > sources, and not packaged. > > Is it feasible to build libbacktrace as a shared library and ship it in > a corresponding package? Or should I rather go for a bundling exception > request? So in writing a reply to this, I noticed the guidelines around this are actually fairly unclear and subject to interpretation. The section on this topic from https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines reads: "Duplication of system libraries A package should not include or build against a local copy of a library that exists on a system. The package should be patched to use the system libraries. This prevents old bugs and security holes from living on after the core system libraries have been fixed. In this RPM packaging context, the definition of the term 'library' includes: compiled third party source code resulting in shared or static linkable files, interpreted third party source code such as Python, PHP and others. At this time JavaScript intended to be served to a web browser on another computer is specifically exempted from this but this will likely change in the future. Note that for C and C++ there's only one "system" in Fedora but for some other languages we have parallel stacks. For instance, python, python3, jython, and pypy are all implementations of the python language but they are separate interpreters with slightly different implementations of the language. Each stack is considered its own "system" and can each contain its own copy of a library." The thing that is particularly unclear there is the definition of "a system" (as in "a library that exists on a system"). The following paragraphs seem to imply that Fedora's stacks for languages/frameworks that implement some kind of shared library functionality are to be understood as "systems" in that context. This is still not made *entirely* clear, though, really. The page https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libraries has all sorts of rationale and process stuff, but still no clear definition of precisely what it is that constitutes a "bundled library". Even more confusingly, https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Treatment_Of_Bundled_Libraries seems to have a rather different definition from that given on Packaging:Guidelines. It reads: "(bundled libraries being defined as libraries which exist and are mantained independently, whether or not they are packaged separately for Fedora)" to me, that seems fundamentally different from the definition that is somewhat unclearly implied on the Packaging:Guidelines page. Has this been considered before? Is there a superior definition somewhere, or an accepted interpretation which is consistent with both pages? Do we in fact need a section in Packaging:Guidelines and then two separate 'subsidiary' pages all on the topic of bundled libraries? Would it make more sense to combine all the details onto a single subsidiary page and have Packaging:Guidelines just have a very short sort of 'summary' and a link to that one subsidiary page? Would that reduce the likelihood of confusion? Thanks! I've seen several cases in the Real World where 'bundled' libraries that are not a part of the Fedora repositories were considered to be OK under the policy, which is a possible interpretation of the policy as given on Packaging:Guidelines, but doesn't really seem to be a possible interpretation of the policy as given on Packaging:Treatment_Of_Bundled_Libraries (as it explicitly states "whether or not they are packaged separately for Fedora"). This could have considerable implementations for webapps if it were interpreted strictly, I think. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
