Zitat von Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org>:
Quoting Cyril Brulebois (kibi@debian.org):4) http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.blender.devel/19895 Patch to add support for system-wide FTGL. I kind of get flamed for thinking about using something else than what blender provides. And who cares about shared libraries anyway, they are dangerous. If you want to have a good idea of what blender folks think about being distributed, you want to read that thread.That one shows the problem clearly enough. Blender folks are not interested in using system-wide libs *at all*. They apparently prefer using their own private (and buggy....Sam made the point very clear) version of a library, on the vague assumption that, as libraries change their API without warning, they're bad. I'm anything but a specialist in this area, but my understanding is that this is what sonames are about..:-). Anyway, in 2009, such reasoning is....awfully flawed. Just drop that blender thing and announce this loudly enough, preferrably by coordinating with other distro maintainers. That will eventually trigger a fork from people who have a more collaborative way of thinking. After all, to my understanding, this blender stuff is kinda widely used in 3D modelling, right?
I read that discussion in a different tone as it mostly refers to the FTGL thing. They made changes to the library that are needed and blender would not work correctly without those. The patch doesn't ensure that the system version of that library includes those changes, it doesn't even check for known good versions. This was the main complaint especially since there is no release of FTGL with those changes, yet! So they cannot expect for everyone (and there are other distributions, too) to use _unreleased_ versions of a library (release candidates are not a release). Together, these are valid points for linking a private copy that was tested against. They didn't say anything against having to update that copy.
Additionally, not all upstream library developers are aware of how SONAMEs are to be handled (and maybe they got burned by this before). Maybe because libtool's description of SONAMEs is way to complicated (what insane person wrote this?) and limited, and because other popular systems don't support this. After all, users only see bugs in the frontend, not in the libraries behind it. And there are lots of other projects, too, that include private copies of libraries (e.g. mplayer). This was even the proposed way for some GNU stuff some time ago!
HS