Re. subsurface: FTBFS in experimental

[Thiago Macieira]

On Wednesday 26 August 2015 06:50:20 Dirk Hohndel wrote:
> And then there is Linux. 1/5th of the number of users that Windows has
> (for Subsurface). Even though on Windows there are tons of alternatives
> and on Linux there's nothing else. And we have all the developers here
> mixed into those numbers. And the fact that Linus started this certainly
> has gotten quite a few people interested in Subsurface. And we currently
> create 4 packages for Ubuntu (we can no longer build on 12.04 - just three
> years old - and Ubuntu no longer allows packages for 14.10). We reuse the
> same for Debian and have been called names for doing so. We have four
> packages for Fedora (F20 no longer builds). Six packages for SuSE. Etc,
> etc.

The solution for this was supposed to be LSB. We'd have created one package 
that would install in all modern distros.

But that's not an option, for multiple reasons and shared responsibility:

1) LSB is unmaintained. The LSB5 effort never happened, so we're stuck at 4.2 
which is 6 years old. Most of the software we'd like to use is not available 
in LSB (namely: Qt 5)

2) Qt 5 doesn't support LSB because we haven't maintained it. Linux is just 
too full of goodies that we always want to use (inotify, futexes, pipe2, dup3, 
accept4). Building for LSB 4.2 would mean dropping those improvements. For 
some of them, I'd be willing to write workarounds or to fall back to non-Linux 
alternatives. For others -- especially the pipe2/dup3/accept4 trio and any 
OpenSSL 1.x calls -- I draw the line. They're required for thread-safety and 
security, so LSB had better update.

3) Subsurface requires the latest and greatest of Qt, which would never work 
inside LSB anyway (would have to stick to an old version). The solution here 
would be to bundle the libraries we use, the same way that we do for Windows 
and OS X: divecomputer, marble, Qt, ICU.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
   Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center
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