Fwd: [GLLUG] Software Distribution

[Charles Ulrich]

On Feb 17, 2008 10:25 PM, Richard Houser <rick at divinesymphony.net> wrote:
> 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.

To distribute your software as widely as possible, not only might you
have to build packages for the two most recent versions of those
distributions, but then you also have to build packages for each major
architecture that the distribution supports. All of this takes up way
too much time for the independent developer and might make a company
think twice about trying to support Linux. For example, I recently
looked into creating Ubuntu/Debian packages and the process is not
trivial. RPMs are a bit easier, but not by much.

This is one of the big negatives to Linux and it is one of the few
drawbacks to having multiple distributions for essentially the same
OS. Unfortunately, it is a hard problem to solve. Maybe someday,
somebody will devise a third-party package manager that ships on all
major distributions and handles the packages themselves as easily as a
Windows or OS X installer does. But such a thing is still probably a
long way off.

Charles