Re: GNOME xdg-app runtime doesn't follow the jhbuild modulesets

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 12:59 PM, Daniel Espinosa <esodan gmail com> wrote:
> Are there a way to create a org.gnome.Sdk.Extra depending on official
> org.gnome.Sdk, in order to add less common/used libraries, like
> GtkSourceView, libgee GXml and others?

xdg-app does not have a recursive dependency system. We don't want to
reproduce the mess that is todays packaging systems. There's just
three levels here:

The host OS: contains the desktop shell, session services, portals, etc
The runtime: contains common libraries that are widely shared and
stable - this will generally depend on the host OS (eg by expecting
kernel features, DBus apis, etc)
The application: contains the application binary, data and metadata,
as well as any libraries that the application depends on that are not
found in the runtime that the application uses

Once you get used to it, including a few libraries with the
application is not very burdensome and gives you a whole lot of
freedom: You don't need to frantically keep your application
up-to-date wrt to changes in the library versions that the OS ships.
Just pick a version that works for you and update to newer versions at
your own speed.

> I saw options on xdg-app-builder to create SDK, why are they there then?

An SDK is a twin sibling of a runtime: it contains the same libraries
as the runtime, and in addition it includes header files, pkg-config
files, build tools, and other components that are neede to build
applications for the runtime

Adding more libraries to the SDK that are not in the runtime is not
very useful: they won't be available when the application is run on a
users system (where only the runtime is installed).