This came up on debian-devel, and seems like a very cross-distro thing, albeit not ARM-specific, so reposting here. Anyone here able to explain/interested in explaining distro-thinking to the C++ standards people (in San Diego)?
----- Forwarded message from Jussi Pakkanen jpakkane@gmail.com -----
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2018 19:56:29 +0300 From: Jussi Pakkanen jpakkane@gmail.com To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org Subject: Debian packaging, dependency management and the C++ standards meeting X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.2 required=4.0 tests=DKIM_SIGNED,DKIM_VALID, DKIM_VALID_AU,DKIM_VERIFIED,FREEMAIL_FROM,RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.1 List-Id: <debian-devel.lists.debian.org>
Hi
Last week I was at CppCon, which is the biggest C++ developers' conference in the world. There were a lot of talks about dependencies, packaging and deployment and other such things related to Debian. A representative snippet can be seen in this video starting at 1:13:56:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjdCxXdjaSA
The tl/dr version is that people running the C++ standardisation work do not really have knowledge about the way Debian does things and because of this might not take relevant things into consideration. As an example there is a rising trend of "discard ABI stability, static link everything and recompile the world on every change" vibe going on similar to most new system programming languages. This would make things difficult for Debian due to obvious reasons.
They specifically mention that there is a standardisation meeting next month (in San Diego?) and that if people from Debian and other groups underrepresented in the C++ standardisation process were to attend, they would like to talk to them to understand their requirements. This specific thing is mentioned in the video at 1:17, the person in the white shirt answering the question is Titus Winters, Google's C++ lead (of some sort, don't know the specifics) and he is a big advocate of static linking everything.
I can't attend due to geographical reasons but would there be someone who could and would be interested? It would probably be beneficial to have Debian people there to tell about those specific requirements, because it seems like most people on the standardisation committee do not really have a good grasp on what they are. In fact it might make sense to send distro people in general, since the requirements are very similar for Red Hat, Ubuntu, SuSE et al. If you have contacts in those organisations who would be interested in this issue feel free to send them links to this email thread. I know Red Hat at least has sent people to the meeting in the past but on the language/stdlib side, not for packaging (that I know of at least).
An alternative, or parallel, approach could be to write a paper outlining the issues and submitting it to the standard body. This does require someone to be physically at the meeting and to present the paper and its conclusions to the participants and be ready to answer questions. (I have never actually done this myself, so the above description might have flaws.) Having a position paper co-signed by several different distros could be beneficial in making our views heard.
The downside is that the deadline for submitting papers is fairly short, I think something like 1.5 weeks so this would need to move fairly quickly.
Thanks, (not subscribed to the list so please cc)
----- End forwarded message ----- Wookey