David> I'm glad it works for you. When I tested it with Debian and David> Ubuntu I had to install the development packages but otherwise it David> went smoothly. I'm considering adding libffi to the poly source David> since it's licensed under the BSD licence.
Ian> I understand the appeal of this solution, but at least on Debian it Ian> is seriously frowned upon. The maintainer of the Debian package Ian> would probably have to undo it and use the pkg-config interface Ian> anyway to get the package accepted. David> What is the problem? Is it the licensing or the inclusion of a David> library that is already separately available as a package? I was David> really considering it specifically for use on Windows where David> mingw/msys doesn't include pkg-config (though I did manage to David> find a version on the gtk download site, so it's not really an David> issue any more). As I understand it, the objection to embedding external library sources is twofold: both "philosophical" and practical. The philosophical part is that Debian tries to do The Right Thing (TM) even if it is hard, and I think that we can all agree that The Right Thing in this context is to link to an existing shared library as opposed to embedding the source. The practical part has mostly to do with security fixes. If a vulnerability is discovered in libffi, there is no way to scan the sources of all the ~30k packages and hunt for those that might contain a copy of libffi to fix them. -- Ian Zimmerman gpg public key: 1024D/C6FF61AD fingerprint: 66DC D68F 5C1B 4D71 2EE5 BD03 8A00 786C C6FF 61AD Rule 420: All persons more than eight miles high to leave the court. _______________________________________________ polyml mailing list polyml@inf.ed.ac.uk http://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/polyml
