Fwd: [GLLUG] Software Distribution

Richard Houser rick at divinesymphony.net
Sun Feb 17 22:25:53 EST 2008


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Eduardo Cesconetto wrote:
|> I think I did not made myself clear, my suggestion is that whenever
|> there is a release, the release package should contain an installer
|> that would detect the system and pick the right binary to install,
|> just like Apple's UB.
|> In my humble, the reason why RedHat and the Mac OS X are so widely
|> used and accepted are that for a developer to release to those
|> distros, there are a specific set of rules, that among other things,
|> guarantee(or try to) quality and stability. You rarely see that on
|> non-commercial distros, because developers are 90% basement geeks that
|> believe that their way to code should be the only way to code. I have
|> a good experience trying to be the "middle man" between the customer
|> and the developer, and most of the time, those are two different
|> animals that don't even speak the same language.
|> Yes, FOSS is good and the OS model is great, but there should be
|> agreement to bring quality and uniformity, otherwise people will try
|> and get frustrated, and go back to(or stay with) Windows or Mac or RH.
|> About not following a FOSS business model, if Clay can't close his
|> source, what stops Bill from using his commercial contacts to cash
|> into Clay's code? (names here are for illustration only)

A better way is to do what most the distributions do and just supply all
the binaries and let the user/distro/install program choose the
appropriate packages.  For example, you could (and I have) generate a
set of RPMs (you can do the same with DEB, etc) that will build the
binaries for a specified set of architectures and the common scripts,
images, data, etc to go with them all.  The binaries themselves are
typically very small, but there is no reason a machine should need to
store those binaries for another platform.  All the major distributions
do this daily and a substantial portion of open source projects do this
as well.  The biggest barrier to this is normally having access to test
the resulting binaries on the other platforms.
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