Re: spatial stuff detail

[Matthew Berg <galt gothpoodle com>]

On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 08:15, Guido Schimmels wrote:

> What is a basic system? I've installed RHat-8.0 as Workstation/ 
> Developer. /usr/lib alone is 650M big. On the other hand I've assembled  
> a system which take only 300M alltogether (without devel-stuff). On  
> this system you can install *any* application for Gnome2, KDE3, Tcl/Tk,  
> Motif as a single Application directory with no external dependencies  
> whatsoever. The truth is the number of popular libraries is really  
> small. 90% of the libraries out there are only being used by 1-3  
> applications. The sane thing to do is to bundle them with the appdir.  
> you might end up with 2-3 copies of the same library on your disk. So  
> what? You won't lose disk space when you link it in statically, because  
> the apps will only link in a certain percentage of the library each,  
> and you can strip-all the executable - not the shared library. Memory  
> usage will go up only very rarely either, because most of the less  
> ubicitous libs are domain specific. How many media-players, MUA's,  
> games, word processors... do you run simultaneously? More than one of  
> each category? Dependency hell is largely a problem of packagers not  
> seeing the forrest for all the trees.

The biggest issue, IMHO, with bundled libraries isn't a matter of space
or memory; it's updates.  Is it really in the best interest of security
to have to wait for a half dozen applications to be repackaged because a
hole was found in libhippityhooplah?

I'd also wonder how you're supposed to handle things like menu entries,
gconf keys, mime info, help files, etc...  How do they get registered in
the first place, and how do they get cleaned up when the application
goes away?

Matt