Re: Per-type architecture (Re: [10/15] Basic value access routines)

[Mark Kettenis <mark.kettenis@xs4all.nl>]

> Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 08:55:39 -0700
> From: Doug Evans <dje@google.com>
> 
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 5:41 PM, Ulrich Weigand<uweigand@de.ibm.com> wrote:
> > In fact, if it weren't that we want to avoid excessive
> > dependencies on XML libraries, I'd argue we should just parse XML
> > into a standard DOM tree representation as provided by those.
> >
> > Looking at this this way, serialization/deserialization of XML into and out
> > of those "DOM tree" structures *should not* involve too much GDB specifics
> > like GDB private data structures, but simply follow the self-describing
> > property of the XML format ...
> 
> OOC, what "excessive dependencies" are you referring to?
> It seems odd to want to avoid dependencies on libraries, libraries are good.
> [I'm sure there's more to the story here, hence the question.  :-)]

Some people think that a basic UNIX-like system should include the
tools to build and debug computer programs, at least those written in
C.  So on OpenBSD (and most of the other BSD's) we ship gcc, binutils
and gdb as part of the base operating system.  This means that if
these tools depend on certain libraries, we have to include those
libraries as well.  There are a couple of issues here:

* We think we should not ship any libraries that have a license that
  is more restrictive than the BSD license.

* We think we should only ship "standard" libraries since shipping
  "non-standard" libraries encourages people to write programs that
  are non-portable.

* We think that we should only ship libraries that meet certain
  minimal quality standards, especially with respect to security.

Another perhaps less OpenBSD-specific argument is that I think it
should be possible for people to compile software themselves.  This
sort of breaks down if before being able to compile that software I
first need to install a dozen of libtraries, especially if those
libraries themseleves have dependencies.