Fwd: [GLLUG] Software Distribution

Richard Houser rick at divinesymphony.net
Mon Feb 18 21:41:38 EST 2008


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

| 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.

You only need to build packages for multiple versions of a distribution
if you neither ship statically compiled code nor ship the dynamic
libraries that your code depends on.  If you pick either of those routes
(the later is common for commercial games), you only need to ship one
set per architecture.  I prefer dynamically linked libraries myself for
size, but the commercial distributor doesn't need to make that same
trade off.  In fact, in the Windows world, file sizes would seem to
indicate that relying on common components is a relatively rare thing
(and with Vista, DLLs were supposed to be managed such that each
application gets it's own set).  Besides, that's what the whole /opt
tree is for.

| 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.

Windows doesn't do much in the way of package management.  Basically,
the installers consist of programs that add and remove files and verify
dependencies.  Really, RPM or DEB do handle everything you described
when done properly.  Plus, products like Installshield are still
available for Linux (but I don't see the point of using them).
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mandriva - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFHukHeUMkt1ZRwL1MRAlTIAJ9JeM3q8hXrN5Cw0p0ov+04lPuyWgCggFKi
CKnwAyl4uP+YkSauPZaREck=
=OGnC
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


More information about the linux-user mailing list