Future Fedora Development

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Tomasz Kłoczko wrote:

> It will be good remove multiple implementation of:
> - term toolkit (lang, libtermcap and ncurses). Use only ncurses will fit
>   all what is neccessary,. Patching all program for use libncursesw will
>   allow remove distribute libncurses library (now are distributed
>   libncurses and libncursesw) and move libncurses to kind
>   compat-ncurses package.

I also want to see libtermcap die, but then libncurses and its
terminfo database would have to move from /usr to / to support
applications such as vim.

Maybe all the exotic terminals could remain in /usr/share/terminfo
while the root partition would only have minimal support for the
most common ones (linux, vt100, xterm, etc).


> - multiple digests operation (openssl, gnutls, nss .. some programs are
>   now linked with *all* avalaible implemntations 8-0 ),

Yeah, I agree.  OpenSSL seems to be the most comprehensive, but
its licence stinks and this is why gnutls was written in the first
place.  Now that Mozilla adopted the triple MPL/GPL/LGPL license,
there's no reason to keep gnutls any more.

OpenSSL also tends to break its ABI very often and this is very
annoying when upgrading to a new version of Fedora. I'd ditch
that one too if wasn't used by so many packages.


> - multipme XML parsers. Now some programs are linked with more than
>   one XML parser library. For example fontconfig now uses expat but can
>   be on build stage compiled as using libxml2 .. but most GNOME programs
>   uses libxml2.

I used libxml2 once and I really don't like its API (very error prone,
like glib).

libexpat looks much better, has no other dependencies and it's very
small, but it doesn't have an equivalent of libxslt and xsltproc.


> This is only few points from much more larger list.
> For example now in Fedora is avalaible libdbi but there is no other
> programs which uses this library .. except dictd which unondiotionaly if
> will find libdbi on autoconf level causes compile dbi dictd pliugin
> (anyone uses this ? one persone or more ?). Why this unused piece of
> <censored> was added to distributed packages list ?
>
> More .. why many packages do not have separated devel resources ? Why so
> many packages still have static libraries and .la files ? Why so many
> packages still build static libraries and and removes this on %install
> sttage if on %build can be added --disable-static to autoconf options ?

I 100% agree with you here.  Fedora could use a good diet.

-- 
  // Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept.
\X/  http://www.develer.com/