Autopackage 1.0 [LWN.net]

Autopackage 1.0

Posted Apr 1, 2005 3:37 UTC (Fri) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047)
In reply to: Autopackage 1.0 by boudewijn
Parent article: Autopackage 1.0

No...distributions should package binaries, and the makers of the software can (if they choose)
package binaries as well, and if the binaries they provide aren't compatible with the distribution,
then the user can go grab a source tarball and do the usual ./configure; make; make install
dance (or, on Gentoo, the emerge dance).

This thing looks like it'd really only be helpful for distributors of proprietary software. I'm not
100% opposed to people running proprietary binaries on GNU/Linux systems, but I don't think
it's a great idea for us in the free software community to be "giving away the store" to the
vendors of these programs. If they want to package binaries for a distro, they can build
packages appropriate to that distro.

Or, y'know, create static binaries, so as to avoid library dependency headaches.

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Autopackage 1.0

Posted Apr 1, 2005 12:09 UTC (Fri) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

"This thing looks like it'd really only be helpful for distributors of
proprietary software."

And for me, and I'm the maintainer of a free software application.

Autopackage 1.0

Posted Apr 10, 2005 21:59 UTC (Sun) by FooBarWidget (guest, #10500) [Link]

So your "solution" is "grab the source & compile". Well autopackage is *not* designed for people like you. It's designed for people who don't want to compile things. You know, people like my parents, new Linux users, etc. In other words: people unlike you.

Apart from being one of the autopackage core developers, I'm also the maintainer of several open source projects. And telling everybody to compile the source code is not solution! You know, some people do care about having an easy way for users to install the software, even if the software is not in the distribution's repository. You say autopackage is only helpful to proprietary software, yet the only applications that use autopackage at the moment are 100% open source!