[techtalk] Library standardization?

[Laurel Fan]

Excerpts from linuxchix: 29-Sep-99 [techtalk] Library standard.. by
Amanda Knox at hardline.org 
> Is there any form of library standardization in progress? 

Not that I know of.  The "standard" libraries are only standard because
everyone has them.  I suppose there probably is a set of libraries that
every major distribution installs by default, if you don't consider
different versions to be different libraries.

> Seems like
> every time I try to install something new, I get some kind of library
> conflict. Either I don't have the standard library it needs, or the
> development one, or something else. Tonight it took almost three hours
> to acquire and install libraries for KICQ (the ICQ clone written for
> KDE) using RH 6.0. One of the major problems was the need for two
> different forms of JPEG libraries, written by two different groups. It
> was very frustrating, and I ended up having to compile the source on my
> own computer, instead of installing the RPM. 

That's why I use Debian.  In the stable version, everything the package
could possibly depend on is in the distribution, and the packaging tool
can resolve them itself if I want it to. Ok, enough Debian ranting for
today :)
  
> Sooo... :)
> Has there been any thought to making sense of the kazillions of
> libraries? Maybe putting some of the features together into larger
> libraries, or releasing the standard and development ones together? I
> know this probably sounds really simplistic, but I don't know my apples
> from my oranges yet :P

Well, this would be pretty difficult, since merging two similar
libraries, such as JPEG libraries, would mean taking one implementation
over the other where they overlap, as well as taking one naming or
parameter ordering convention over the other (are the functions called
read_jpeg, or JPEG_read, etc.).  Since every open source developer
thinks that they're doing it the right way, this doesn't happen often. 
Since some people won't want to change their code to support the new
combined library, all this will really do is create a third JPEG
library, since there will be programs that want the new one and programs
that want each of the old ones.

Also, just combining different libraries won't do a whole lot of good,
because if you combine libraries libx, liby, and libz into libxyz,
someone who needed libx will now have to download the even bigger
libxyz...



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