Re: libunique external dependency for 2.25?

["Matthias Clasen" <matthias clasen gmail com>]

2008/10/3 Josselin Mouette <joss debian org>:
> Le jeudi 02 octobre 2008 à 23:23 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi a écrit :
>> another issue is that libunique is pretty much a testing ground for API
>> and requirements and while the basic functionality is obviously already
>> implemented I still receive requests[2] that make sense to add *before*
>> putting the whole shebang in gtk+. we do put stuff in libegg to have it
>> ready for later integration with a reasonable set of API, right?
>
> Let me jump on this occasion to say that it is not nice at all to put
> stuff in libegg. This code is generally duplicated in a number of
> tarballs without any kind of control.
>
> When we distributors need to fix a bug, or worse, a security issue, in
> such a library, we have to find all packages that use it and then fix
> all of them, both of which are unrealistic. This is why our policy
> forbids code duplication.
>
> I'm speaking only with a Debian hat, but I guess it would be much easier
> for all distributors if these libraries were shipped in one or several
> specific tarballs. Even with a constantly changing API or ABI – libtool
> -release is here to manage that case.

The alternative is to ship a constantly api/abi changing library,
which means you'll either have to constantly patch apps to work with
the version you ship or you end up shipping multiple versions of the
library. Which brings you back to having to fix stuff in multple
places...