Re: How can you ship with new libraries?

[Daniel Elstner <daniel kitta googlemail com>]

Hi,

Am Donnerstag, den 23.07.2009, 11:59 -0500 schrieb Damian Frank:
> I'm sorry if this seems like a poorly targeted or researched question,
> but I can't find any information on this and I'm not sure where to
> look.

This is indeed not the right place.  But I don't know what the right
place would be either.  This is more a matter of accumulated experience
and understanding the motivation behind fundamental design decisions.

> I want to ship an application with recent versions of pango and cairo,
> but it's important to me not to be dependent on platforms that include
> those libraries.  On Linux, for instance, I want to support
> distributions at least as old as Centos 4.7.  On Windows, this has
> been somewhat straightforward; once built, throwing all the DLLs
> together and loading them at runtime just works.

Well, let's just say that this Windows "feature" comes at a price.  But
you are right that it is easier to do that sort of thing on Windows.

> On Linux, however, I am about to rip my hair out from the dependency
> problems;

It is not impossible, but you will probably be either gray or bald in
the end.  In a nutshell, concerted distribution upgrades are the Linux
answer to the dependency problem.  The custom to ship and install any
dependencies with the application itself is the Windows answer.

I hope you have a choice... otherwise, good luck.  You will be mostly on
your own.

> Anyway, I think what I really want to know is, how on earth do people
> ship binary applications on Linux with specific versions of pango and
> cairo, i.e. without depending on the distribution?  What's the best
> practice here?

Easy.  They don't, and it is generally not considered good practice.

--Daniel