Goal: Increased Modularity?

[Richi Plana]

On Tue, 2007-09-04 at 13:55 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> It's somehow better to have each package require its own separate
> configuration than to use a central package that only takes 2MB? I'm
> not saying you can't do it, but:
> 
> - every mutt user would have to set up their own muttrc with smtp server information
> - every fetchmail user would have to change their invocation
> - and so on, for each package as needed

I would say services directory or service discovery. But I digress.

BTW, evolution and thunderbird users set up their own outgoing mail
configuration. Personally it would be nicer if these services could be
discovered or configured by an administrator globally or per user, but
if the usage of a program like /sbin/sendmail must be hardcoded, then at
the very least have some kind of smart fallback.

> > > dlopen will cause you to break at runtime instead of buildtime if
> > > ABI changes - that's not good.
> > 
> > Isn't that what escalating the version number to a higher layer (ie. RPM
> > and yum) is all about?
> 
> Sure, but then you're still breaking at runtime instead of build/install
> time.

You probably would, but that would be limited with correct versioning
and package management. It wouldn't be any worse than Apache httpd
modules or gstreamer-plugins (the plugins themselves and not the
libraries they link against. Fortunately, it's pretty stable).
--

Richi Plana