According to the ardour developers, the official ebuilds enable a compile-time option (SYSLIBS=1) that cause subtle and widespread problems. And they don't have the time to fix distro specific problems. This report is just a follow up of http://ardour.org/node/2543 The same text was send on the pro-audio email list. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. emerge ardour 2. 3. I don't know which problems they are experimenting because I am using the ebuild from the pro-audio overlay.
(In reply to comment #0) > According to the ardour developers, the official ebuilds enable a compile-time > option (SYSLIBS=1) yes it does and its probably not going to change; bundled libs are a big mess and unsupported security wise, moreover i'm not maintaining the gnome-mm bindings and certainly dont want to have to because ardour wants them bundled. The route to go imho is more the one of bug #255759 than using bundled libs for no valid reason... > that cause subtle and widespread problems. And they don't > have the time to fix distro specific problems. The only bug i'm aware of is bug #235473 which i cant reproduce... moreover "subtle and widespread problems" isn't what i call a bug report, so if you have anything to add please reopen the bug, closing as needinfo meanwhile.
I am the lead author of Ardour. Many years ago (even before Gentoo existed, I think) we used to distribute Ardour without the various C++ libraries that are now included, and we wasted a *ton* of time tracking down wierd GUI behaviour, odd stack tracks and many other bizarre bugs that eventually were traced back to incompatibilities between the way the library/libraries had been compiled and the way Ardour was compiled. We wasted *so* much time that we decided, very much against our will, to include C++ library source precisely to remove this total time suck on our developers (often, me). I understand the objections to bundled libs. If you're going to break Ardour by distributing ebuilds that force SYSLIBS=1, I'd prefer if you simply stop distributing ebuilds at all. Otherwise, we will be happy to permanently blacklist the Gentoo ebuild, and post a prominent notice on ardour.org instructing Gentoo users to not install the ebuild if they want support. We simply cannot afford the time it takes to get into debugging problems with Gentoo users only to realize that its just another variation on the SYSLIBS=1 problem.
Or you could do the _right thing_ and just tell the Gentoo users to report the problem _to us_ before they report it to you. Which is exactly what we want. I can understand that you waste time to debug problems with system libraries, but the reason is, most likely, that the kind of interaction troubles that those problems are caused from is not your area of expertise. We don't pretend to shove that kind of problems on you. On the other hand we have specific expertise in dealing with these kind of problems and we expect to track down eventual issues. For instance if you see "weird behaviour", you might not come down to ask the output of "LD_DEBUG=bindings LD_DEBUG_OUTPUT=debug.log ardour", but I would. Why? Because it tells me who defined what. Also, one very likely problem if the libraries are all "C++ libraries" from "before Gentoo existed" is due to ABI changes; GCC is ABI-stable since 3.4 and we know how to deal with further ABI changes. Indeed, mixing 2.95, pre-3.4 and post-3.4 compiled C++ code _is_ a recipe for disaster. We don't allow that. I suggest you to read my post on the topic http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2009/01/02/bundling-libraries-for-despair-and-insecurity . If you still have _documented_ cases of situations where your bundled libraries actually solve a problem, I'd be very glad to look into those to fix them. If what you have is just "user $foo who built his system by himself has $this problem, and when we bundled them it worked", then please understand _you_ are wasting _our_ time by using internal copies of libraries. “You know, back in the days floppy weren't reliable, so I don't think I should be using CDs” might sound pretty silly but is more or less what you just said, technology-transposed.
Paul, I dissected your comment in a more cold-blooded post at http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2009/03/23/bundling-libraries-the-curse-of-the-ancients if you care to read about it. Thanks.
