Pipe dreams...

> Have you tried to do the same (compile software and it's dependencies from scratch) under
Windows? Try it some time. You'll probably need to find few abandoned packages, buy some tools
- and in the end get some non-working piece of software because your system included wrong set
of headers...

They point is _I_Don't_have_to_. Not when I just want to run the software.

Every major open source project I've seen that has Windows support supplies Windows users with
executables and supplies Linux users with source tarballs, with only a few exceptions on the
Linux side.

-------------------------------------------

I think your misunderstanding me a bit:


What I want to see is a video game like Planeshift (It's a decent Linux MMORPG which follows
the ID Software approach were the engine is GPL, but the game itself is open, but non-free)
simply supply two DEB (or whatever) packages, themselves, that outline the dependencies and
versions they need.

Then the various distributions just pull down that package. If there is something wrong then
they figure it out and send a patch back to upstream.

Right now the package makers working for the various distributions are a huge bottleneck in
the distribution of new Linux software. This is because it requires such a huge manual
brute-force approach. For some software this is the only way it's going to work, but for the
vast majority.. something I expect like 80% don't need that level of dedication from the
distributions. 

Even if they supply it in deb-src format, and distributions use their servers to compile it,
then it's still worlds better then what we have now.

Get it now?

Going back to video games, in Linux there is no way for the average Linux user to compile
them. The makers of them are forced to use all those nasty scripts and install dialogs to
package them for Linux users. That's they only way they can get it to work.

And like you said they are full of nastiness like having to use scripts with ld_library_path
and statically compiled binaries and weirdness. These make the games much larger then they
need to be and make it impossible for Linux users to use anything but the very latest games on
the very latest distribution releases.

And beta testing? _FORGET_IT_. It's impossible. Even for the latest and greatest from Debian
Unstable I need to do things like setup a chroot environment because trying to install the
software I need will obliterate any hope of having apt-get not break my system. And with that
your looking at _days_ of effort. 

And on top of that, because the way Linux users are utterly dependent on their
distributions-supplied packages, there is no way the average Linux users will ever know about
90% of the games that are available for Linux unless they subscribe religiously to something
like happypenguin.org,

So what we have in Linux distributions is a handful of fairly decent FPS or some smaller
'gnome' or 'kde' games and older stuff that are packaged by the distribution maintainers, but
they don't have the time or desire to track down every new release of every game out there.

And that's just games. 

I could go on and on for any sort of type of software you want.

How about Host-based Intrusion detection systems? I am working on evaluating that stuff from
work and due to various thingsthat are 100% out of the control of myself, my bosses, and my
entire company, having to compile things from source is not fun. It's certainly possible, but
it adds lots of hoops. And entirely besides that I don't like to have to install a large
number of developer's tools on production machines.

How many of these are packaged by your distribution?
Samhain
OSSEC
Integrit
AIDE
Tripwire (OSS version)
Tiger

They all seem to be good, solid, and stable pieces of software. And they don't have very
complex dependencies or anything like that. Some are packaged for certain distributions, some
are packaged for others, and some are packaged for none. There is no reason why they can't
simply supply a couple binaries in their own packages so I can install them and test them out,
except that I can't. Because distributions are the gatekeepers to what is installable on my
system and they don't have the manpower to manage all of that on their own.

(OOOHHH.. that's right. I am using Linux so I don't have to care about malware or rootkits
because the packages supplied by my distribution is the perfect way to provide my system with
unbreakable security. Well that solves that problem!)