Fedora and Red Hat Leftovers
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Red Hat ☛ How to analyze changes to enum types using abidiff
It is required to have a stable application binary interface (ABI) when maintaining a stable shared library that is written in C or C++ and shipped as part of a complex software stack. Developers must comply with this requirement. When building a newer version of a shared library, developers may try the following approach:
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Flathub Blog: On the Go: Making it Easier to Find GNU/Linux Apps for Phones & Tablets
With apps made for different form factors, it can be hard to find what works for your specific device. For example, we know it can be a bit difficult to find great apps that are actually designed to be used on a mobile phone or tablet. To help solve this, we’re introducing a new collection: On the Go.
As the premier source of apps for Linux, Flathub serves a wide range of people across a huge variety of hardware: from ultra powerful developer workstations to thin and light tablets; from handheld gaming consoles to a growing number of mobile phones. Generally any app on Flathub will work on a desktop or laptop with a large display, keyboard, and mouse or trackpad. However, devices with only touch input and smaller screen sizes have more constraints.
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LWN ☛ Vendoring Go packages by default in Fedora
The Go language is designed to make it easy for developers to import other Go packages and compile everything into a static binary for simple distribution. Unfortunately, this complicates things for those who package Go programs for Linux distributions, such as Fedora, that have guidelines which require dependencies to be packaged separately. Fedora's Go special interest group (SIG) is asking for relief and a loosening of the bundling guidelines to allow Go packagers to bundle dependencies into the packages that need them, otherwise known as vendoring. So far, the participants in the discussion have seemed largely in favor of the idea.
Discussions about vendoring and distribution packaging are not new nor unique to Go or Fedora. LWN has covered the overlap between language and distribution package managers in 2017, vendoring and packaging Kubernetes for Debian in 2020, a discussion around iproute2 and libbpf vendoring also in 2020, and another Debian conversation about vendoring in 2021—and there's no doubt similar discussions have taken place in the interim. It is a recurring topic because it remains an unsolved problem and a perennial pain point for packagers for Linux distributions that have policies that discourage bundling.