Re: spatial stuff detail

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Sun, 2003-09-21 at 19:17, John Siracusa wrote:
> On Sep 21, 2003, at 6:41 PM, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > You are confusing shared libraries with interchangable components.  
> > You never, ever repalce teh OS X or Win32 'libc' with another version, 
> > for example, but you're quite free to use glibc, dietlibc, etc. w/ 
> > Linux.
> 
> Isn't libc isn't a shared library?  And there's no reason you can't 
> install and use any other libc variants in OS X.

Try it.  ;-)

> 
> > Likewise, the OS X GUI is there to stay and not replaced.  The Windows 
> > GUI is the same way.  yet on Linux, you can use XFree86, another X 
> > server, DirectFB, Fresco, etc. And then on top of those, you an run a 
> > plain WM, a mini-desktop, or one of several full blown complete 
> > destksops liek GNOME, KDE, ROX, XFCE, GNUStep, etc.
> 
> You can run X11, KDE, and friends in addition to (or instead of, I 
> suppose) the Aqua GUI in OS X.

Yes, but those are add-ons.  You only need those for non-native Aqua
apps, which are an entirely different story.  When you start bringing
over Linux/UNIX apps to OS X, of course you're going to add the
dependency hell to the system.  Only worrying about real Aqua apps, you
never have to worry about KDE, X11, etc.

> 
> > Also, the desktops vary a lot.  It *really* makes a difference if you 
> > have GNOME2.0 or GNOME2.4 from a development standpoint, since apps 
> > written for a later version don't work at all with the previous - the 
> > API isn't really 'stable' at all, it's just kept backwards compatible. 
> > [...]
> >
> > Compare this to Linux, UNIX, where we have a metric shitload of 
> > varying libraries, toolkits, utility apps, etc., many of which aren't 
> > anywhere close to stable in ABI, many of which have different versions 
> > that aren't co-installable, none of which can be sanely or easily 
> > detected, many of which can be installed or compiled in wholly 
> > incompatible ways, etc.
> >
> > *That's* how Linux is more "pluggable" and Windows/OS X more 
> > "monolithic."
> 
> That sounds like "less stable", not "more pluggable", IMO.

Which is the point - Linux is more pluggable, and thus less "stable,"
meaning the app folders don't really work that well in comparison.  Even
the simplest of apps in Linux is going to require a couple dependencies
that a basic system probably wouldn't have.  Unless you start saying the
"Linux *always* includes XFree86 4+, GNOME2.4+, and exactly glibc2.3"
then almost no app is going to be a "Linux app."  If it was, nobody
would be complaining about dependency problems.  ;-)

(The LSB does standardize various libraries, and are apparantly looking
t GTK for standardization too, but that barely improves the situation -
most real user apps need a lot more than just X, libc, and GTK.)

Anyways, this should probably carry on elsewhere than the desktop-devel
list, getting pretty off topic.  ;-)

> 
> -John
> 
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-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.