On 1/16/13 8:40 AM, Alec Warner wrote:
> Google generally prefers agility. Particularly when machines have gobs
> of memory (so bundling is not as big of a deal as it was previously)
> and they can staff security fixes for all their bundled libs. This is
> quite a pervasive attitude there. Coming from a distribution
> background it can be weird to see the different priorities (and
> terrible systems that build the packages that work on $DISTRO, ew.)

Bundling is not a problem because of build time, memory usage of disk
space concerns (they are to some degree, but that's _not_ the primary
reason).

The biggest problem are incompatible forks (which we have in chromium
tree), which actually hinder agility.

For example, system ICU is more recent than the bundled one. Same for
several other bundled libraries. A lot of effort goes into maintaining
the forks and cherry-picked patches - that effort could be spent on
something else.

People often speak about the cost of unforking/unbundling, but
forking/bundling has its cost too. Because of Windows and Mac, some
libraries have to be bundled, but there should be no reason to fork (at
least not long-term).

Paweł

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