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

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 04:12:10PM -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> 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.

But the GNOME runtime is based on the freedesktop.org runtime, no?

> 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.

Bundling is great for libraries that don't follow the runtime release
schedule. A good example is bundling the libgit2 (which currently don't
guarantee API stability) in gitg.

"You don't need to frantically keep your application up-to-date wrt to
changes in the library versions that the OS ships."

This is true for the libraries present in the runtime too, not just the
libraries bundled with the application. An application can depend on a
specific version of the runtime, e.g. GNOME 3.20.

But there is a big difference between the libraries present in the
runtime and the bundled libraries: the libraries in the runtime are
regularly updated to the latest micro versions to include bug fixes,
translation updates, etc. If the library needs to be bundled to an
application, the packager ideally needs to frantically update the
xdg-app each time there is a new micro version of one of the bundled
libraries. If there is an almost automatic way to do that, it would
lessen the maintenance burden on the packager.

--
Sébastien