[GLLUG] Software Distribution

[Eduardo Cesconetto]

Thanks Charlie, that is exactly what I mean...


On Feb 18, 2008, at 1:55 AM, Charles Ulrich wrote:

> 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