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Packaging, Vendoring, and How It’s Changing

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 18th of December 2019 06:33:51 PM Filed under
Development
GNU
Linux

Let’s start by clarifying what distribution packaging is. This is your linux or platforms method of distributing it’s programs libraries. For our discussion we really only care about linux so say suse or fedora here. How macOS or FreeBSD deal with this is quite different.

Now these distribution packages are built to support certain workflows and end goals. Many open source C projects release their source code in varying states, perhaps also patches to improve or fix issues. These code are then put into packages, dependencies between them established due to dynamic linking, they are signed for verification purposes and then shipped.

This process is really optimised for C applications. C has been the “system language” for many decades now, and so we can really see these features designed to promote - and fill in gaps - for these applications.

For example, C applications are dynamicly linked. Because of this it encourages package maintainers to “split” applications into smaller units that can have shared elements. An example that I know is openldap which may be a single source tree, but often is packaged to multiple parts such as the libldap.so, lmdb, openldap-client applications, it’s server binary, and probably others. The package maintainer is used to taking their scapels and carfully slicing sources into elegant packages that can minimise how many things are installed to what is “just needed”.

We also see other behaviours where C shared objects have “versions”, which means you can install multiple versions of them at once and programs declare in their headers which library versions they want to consume. This means a distribution package can have many versions of the same thing installed!

This in mind, the linking is simplistic and naive. If a shared object symbol doesn’t exist, or you don’t give it the “right arguments” via a weak-compile time contract, it’s likely bad things (tm) will happen. So for this, distribution packaging provides the stronger assertions about “this program requires that library version”.

As well, in the past the internet was a more … wild place, where TLS wasn’t really widely used. This meant that to gain strong assertions about the source of a package and that it had not been tampered, tools like GPG were used.

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