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Too much choiceToo much choicePosted Jan 20, 2008 10:18 UTC (Sun) by jhs (subscriber, #12429)In reply to: Too much choice by jwb Parent article: Fedora developers on PackageKit
I think this is a chauvinist comment. You are insisting on having middle-men modify the software that the author wrote before you use it. It's possible that the authors of the software know better how to integrate it into a distribution than a volunteer packager in some cases. The reality is that this is a case-by-case situation. And as I said in my other reply in this thread, the current package system does not scale. Nobody is satisfied: distributions can only get as much software on their platform as they have resources to make packages for; ISVs are frustrated with the effort it takes just to get the software in front of the user's eyes; and users are frustrated because it's hard to find and install software for their system easily. In some situations, like servers and secure environments, I fully support packaging and the good tight integration that comes with it. But free software is about choice, and right now, there is no choice for software distribution. Everybody just has to bite the bullet.
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Too much choice Posted Jan 20, 2008 12:12 UTC (Sun) by jmtapio (guest, #23124) [Link] I think this is a chauvinist comment. You are insisting on having middle-men modify the software that the author wrote before you use it. It's possible that the authors of the software know better how to integrate it into a distribution than a volunteer packager in some cases. While it is possible that some authors can be better at integrating than some of the packagers, in my personal experience packagers usually are better at integration than the original authors. I believe this is because ultimately the authors are more interested on their own specific software, its quality and functionality. Packagers on the other hand are interested in making the whole system coherent. This includes stuff like placing documentation where it is supposed to be, integrating startup-scripts, wrappers, registering this and that to the system and so on. All of that is usually secondary for the authors themselves.
Too much choice Posted Jan 22, 2008 12:58 UTC (Tue) by Tom2 (guest, #43780) [Link] Perhaps this is a circular argument? 1. Distributions fail to provide tools to let ISV's provide software that integrates easily with their distribution. 2. ISV's therefore produce packages that don't integrate well. 3. Users blame ISVs, and applaud distributions for their centralised packagers, since they clearly work much better.
Too much choice Posted Jan 24, 2008 21:18 UTC (Thu) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link] 1. Distributions fail to provide tools to let ISV's provide software that integrates easily with their distribution. For Debian-based distributions, this is simply false. The tools (dpkg, debhelper, etc.) are there, and the documentation is there. The facilities to ask questions are there. And you don't have to build separate packages for each distribution variation -- it takes real effort to build packages that install and run on stable that won't install and run on testing or unstable. Yes, it takes time to read the docs, and learn the basic packaging tools. But if you're not willing to do that, then why on earth would I trust your FooBarPkg package not to overwrite some critical library file or configuration? And if you don't want to take the time to integrate with the basic distribution (which might be a reasonable decision), then there is a long established, well-worked out scheme: unpack the tar.gz file under /opt/pkgname, and do whatever the hell you want under there. Anything in between is silly and dangerous.
Too much choice Posted Jan 20, 2008 15:57 UTC (Sun) by robilad (guest, #27163) [Link] It's impossible that authors know much about most of the platforms their software is being distributed on, due to factors like amount of choice in platforms, and access to them, or in case of ISVs, the platforms they make money from, and are willing to support, and the rest. A system that puts authors above distributors is going to fail, as it puts people who have next to no idea about the end user's environment in charge over those that do.
Too much choice Posted Jan 21, 2008 12:14 UTC (Mon) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] Not sure if this is such a big deal, Things like Java and acrobat have been distributed as fancy tarballs for ages. All ISVs need to do is put up a tarball with a description of system requirements and people will make installers for various systems for you, no charge. If you as ISV stick to using LSB libc and other standard libraries you really shouldn't have any problems....
Too much choice Posted Jan 21, 2008 12:59 UTC (Mon) by robilad (guest, #27163) [Link] Java has been an amusingly painful story, if you look at the trouble the debian/jpackage/gentoo folks have been going through to make the binary blobs fit into the distributions, from in-the-middle-of-the-night updates to the tarballs by the vendors without a version change breaking md5 sums all over the place, to the inability to fetch the tarballs directly legally without interacting with a licensing mechanism, to breakage due to binary ABI changes , and a whole lot of other fun war stories the bug trackers and change logs can tell.
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