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0 pointsdylan-m4y ago0 comments

> Basically, what Linux distributions have failed to do is to create a higher level SDK for their platforms - instead, they rely on a soup of libraries and on the package maintainer model to know which of these is which.

At the same time, the tools which solve this really shine. You inevitably run into these issues with random third party dependencies on other platforms, too, but it's further from the norm, so you end up with awful bespoke toolchains that contain instructions like "download Egub35.3.zip and extract it to C:\Users\brian\libs."

Developers on GNOME deal with this regularly, partially because of our lack of a high level SDK. So one of the tools we have to solve this is first class support for flatpak runtimes in GNOME Builder: plop a flatpak manifest in your project directory (including whatever base runtime you choose and all your weird extra libraries) and Builder will use that as an environment to build and run the thing for development. This is why pretty much everything under https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME has a flatpak runtime attached. It's a young IDE, but that feature alone makes it incredible to work with.

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simiones4y ago

> You inevitably run into these issues with random third party dependencies on other platforms, too, but it's further from the norm, so you end up with awful bespoke toolchains that contain instructions like "download Egub35.3.zip and extract it to C:\Users\brian\libs."

On Windows, there is a very clear solution: for any 3rd party you need outside the Windows SDK, you bundle it into the MSI installer you distribute. When installing the MSI, it can check if this particular 3rd party is already installed, and avoid it.

I don't think I've seen anything like the manual instructions you discuss for more than 10 years. Even OSS projects typically ship with simple installers today.

I believe, but have not tried it personally so may well be wrong, that similar mechanisms are common on MacOS with App packages.

oynqr4y ago

It also makes some software under the Gnome umbrella incredibly hard to package for distributions.

dylan-mOP4y ago

Oh, for sure. Reconciling a bunch of different things' ideas of what libturkey they think they need into a single image must be a nightmare. In theory, that's what BuildStream should be helping with since gnome-build-meta[1] is only going to have one of those for different components to depend on. (If there were two libturkeys, it would be very obviously wrong). But I guess the trouble then is a lot of extra apps aren't in gnome-build-meta?

When I was messing with BuildStream a while ago I found myself wishing projects put reference BuildStream elements in their own git repos, but I suppose that would get messed up in the same way.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta

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