LCA: Disintermediating distributions [LWN.net]

LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 6, 2008 19:01 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
Parent article: LCA: Disintermediating distributions

So the Mozilla foundation, OpenOffice.org and the Mono project should handle all the
integration issues on their own?

The Mozilla distribution is a really good (bad?) example that shows how many wheels a vendor
needs to reinvent:

* A build far for many platforms (and they're always too far behind on Linux)
* Independent bug tracking system
* flawed integration (because the project needs to be self contained)

We will end up with a system made of klik packages.

A few other good programs whose author wanted to have the final say on their usage is qmail
and the rest of the djb programs. Great programs. But never got properly integrated.

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LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 6, 2008 21:52 UTC (Wed) by TRS-80 (subscriber, #1804) [Link]

As you say, getting upstream to make packages for distros seems like an enormous waste of time, unless you tacitly admit there's only a few distros worth caring about. Integration is what distros do, and is driven by the overarching decisions of the distro - do they allow the user flexibility (Debian), or do they shortcut and say "my way or the highway" (Ubuntu)?. Should developers have to know about the idiosyncrasies of integration on OpenSolaris, instead of just writing portable code and letting the OpenSolaris specialists handle the integration? A far better approach is madduck's proposal to get distros to work together. And even then distros like Ubuntu are expecting upstream to waste their time on bureaucracy instead of accepting clearly stable changes. If "standards for how we interact with each other" means taking upstream's word that the changes in the stable tree are really stable, then that's a good move, but at the moment Ubuntu's procedures seem cargo-culted from Solaris without an understanding of how to make them work effectively. Solaris being the home of Architecture Review Committees, interface stability and contracts between modules for use of private interfaces, which OpenSolaris is hoping to streamline and make it more appropriate to open source development.

Other bits from the main article: There's been a OpenID plugin for Bugzilla for 2.5 years (now bitrotted), and it converted from RSS to Atom feeds for searches nearly 2 years ago. What I suspect jdub really wants to prevent is distros doing their development internally as happened with the example in the article (Xgl) and intlclock.

LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 6, 2008 23:16 UTC (Wed) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link]

No, absolutely not -- experiences such as these were merely jumping-off points for the
philosophical challenge (particularly for someone such as myself, who deeply values the
differentiation that the existence of distributions provides us against our proprietary
competitors).

LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 6, 2008 23:18 UTC (Wed) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link]

Note that the thought experiment was not about "making packages for distributions", but "what
would happen if we take distributions out of the picture?". I think that misunderstanding is
the basis for your response.

LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 6, 2008 23:33 UTC (Wed) by TRS-80 (subscriber, #1804) [Link]

And I don't think you can take distros out of the picture - as I said, "Integration is what distros do, and is driven by the overarching decisions of the distro" so you're forcing upstream to make these decisions. Ubuntu's choice of upstart is great, but OpenSolaris uses SMF - why should an upstream project have to choose one or be burdened by supporting both? Maybe D-Bus activation is a better choice for some programs, but not all.

LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 6, 2008 23:40 UTC (Wed) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link]

If your conclusion is that distributions can't be taken out of the picture, then you're not
taking part in the thought experiment. That's okay, but I'm more interested in the thought
experiment than defending the status quo (which I can do very well for myself, but find it
unchallenging and lacking in philosophical value). :-)

LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 6, 2008 23:52 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

The "experiment" is ongoing. You can always install packages directly and not through a
distribution. 

The fact is that most of us use a proper distribution and don't build Linux from scratch. 

Binary packages provided by third parties to Linux are known to be of lower quality (to say
the least). And if you want to completely eliminate distributions, you won't really have
reference platforms, and binary packages may be even more of a pain.

LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 7, 2008 0:02 UTC (Thu) by jdub (subscriber, #27) [Link]

... but the key to this is figuring out what could be better, rather than actively choosing
the worst outcome. :-)

LCA: Disintermediating distributions

Posted Feb 7, 2008 22:49 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

The Mozilla distribution is a really good (bad?) example that shows how many wheels a vendor needs to reinvent: [...]

Don't forget:

A notification method for detecting new versions,
A download mechanism for new versions,
And online upgrading, which can also detect and turn off incompatible extensions.

Any of these problems is hard enough on its own; the solutions given by the Mozilla project don't even work properly on many platforms. On Windows they do work because the platform is mostly dumb about software upgrades (except for Microsoft stuff).

Note that on GNU/Linux systems these jobs are provided by distributions in a quite labor-intensive fashion. Someone must track upstream versions, repackage them, and rebuild all depending and dependent software. For software providers there is no easy generic mechanism to integrate with the distribution; adding repositories for each independent package does not scale at all.