Gary V. Vaughan <gary <at> gnu.org> writes: > > I have an (undoubtedly caffeine induced) idea... why not enhance > gnulib to provide a shim that sits between the system libraries and > client code that wants to use it without shipping (another copy) of > the particular parts it depends upon?
I am somewhat skeptical of this idea, for sevaral reasons. Gnulib mutates too quickly. How would you guarantee that the interface the user installed on their system is new enough to meet your package's needs, particularly when you look through NEWS at how often gnulib interfaces change? Gnulib includes a LOT of source code hacks (witness all the #include_next header replacements). A library only solves API needs, but it does not solve source code needs, so packages will still end up shipping lots of code from gnulib. It's easier to ship all of the source code, than to try and pick out the parts not already covered by an installed library. Think about gnulib-tool --avoid - how does one exclude entry points from an installed library, if they explicitly want to avoid a particular gnulib module (for example, because of licensing incompatibility). Source code distribution makes this task a lot easier. In that vein, not all gnulib modules play together nicely. For example, just from today, vasnprintf now behaves differently on mingw depending on whether you are also using sigpipe-die, and this difference is at the source code level (faking SIGPIPE on mingw comes with a lot of baggage). The choice to use sigpipe-die is a conscious decision of the maintainer, but if gnulib were installed, then you would have to have multiple library versions to expose parameterization to what used to be a compile-time decision. I think http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/gnulib.html#Introduction covers most of these points, as well as mentioning the difficulty in trying to make libiberty an installable library as precedent for the paradigm of keeping gnulib source-only. -- Eric Blake
