Re: New gnome-sdk images with gnome-builder app bundle

[Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org>]

Thanks Alex for the explanation. Makes a lot more sense to me now.

On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 6:27 PM, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:

* Some things are hard to build (glibc and other lowlevel stuff), others
are just painful (webkit). Its very nice for app authors if they can
just rely on this stuff and not have to build and bundle it themselves.

I agree, but this lies ultimately in the definition of "the GNOME platform" (you can change "GNOME" with "KDE" or another platform applications can target).

I would expect that the libraries that are declared as part of the platform to be present, regardless of how hard is it to build them.

 

* Anything we add to the runtime has the potential to conflict with
something bundled by the application (if it needs a different version).

I've currently made the platform pretty minimal. For instance, it
doesn't even have python or perl. I think we need to carefully consider
anything more we add to it.

I get your point, but I can see this becoming quite tricky: for example, why GJS and Vala and not Python? Ultimately I think the platform definition will need to include a set of bindings, together with the supported version(s) of the interpreters. I wouldn't find it practical e.g. for a python application to also bundle python together with the full pygobject bindings, especially because that might depend on a different version of gobject-introspection/glib/etc.

Cosimo