How to best deal with bundled libraries

[Mat Booth]

On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 8:15 AM, Matej Cepl <mcepl at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 2009-04-06, 02:37 GMT, David Nalley wrote:
>> 1. Patch source to point to the library installed on the system
>> rather
>> than the bundled
>> OR
>> 2. symlink from the bundled location to the system library.
>
> Ask Java folks ... some applications have even Sun JRE included
> in the release tarball (ehm, Openfire ;-)) but IIRC (and I am not
> a Java maintainer), the option no. 1 is The Right One.
>
> Thinking about it, it looks to me like you are de facto replacing
> Requires interface between packages with symlink, which seems to
> me like a bad proposition.
>
> Matěj
>

As a Java folk, yeah you tend to get all kinds of third-party jars
bundled with any given application. In Eclipse plugin land (where it
is common practice to bundle all required third-party libs as an
actual Eclipse plugin) we tend to go with option 2, symlink the system
lib into the Eclipse plugin. We have a special command to do it
"build-jar-repository" that lives in the jpackage-utils package. See
the eclipse-epic and eclipse-phpeclipse packages for examples.


-- 
Mat Booth
www.matbooth.co.uk