Too much choice [LWN.net]

Too much choice

Posted Jan 24, 2008 21:02 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: Too much choice by jhs
Parent article: Fedora developers on PackageKit

Each distribution has its own "ABI":

Names of "system" accounts and groups
Exact versions (and configuration) of base libraries
Setup for starting/stopping services (see this LWN issue for a discussion of some different alternatives)
Even if a traditional SysV runlevel-based system is in place, runlevels have very different meanings
Kernel versions, and their small (and not-so-small) differences in behavior

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Too much choice

Posted Jan 25, 2008 8:49 UTC (Fri) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

This is true, but it is still possible to produce a package which will work just about
everywhere (take a look at the VirtualBox "all distributions" installer for a proof of
concept, putting aside the merits and weaknesses of the implementation).  It is certainly
quite a bit of work, but that is at least in part due to lack of experience in the field - I
think that someone who has done it once would be able to do it again with much less effort.