| |||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||
Pipe dreams...Pipe dreams...Posted Aug 16, 2008 2:11 UTC (Sat) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)In reply to: Pipe dreams... by drag Parent article: Something going on with Fedora
Right now we solve problems through a brute force and highly labor intensive approach.. each Linux distro is responsible for packaging software, debugging those packages, and all that sort of thing to compensate for relatively little differences between them. All this huge duplication of work for just minor differences. Reasonable distros do track upstream software as closely as possible, and are careful to ship bug reports (even with proposed fixes) upstream where relevant, so this "huge duplication of work" just isn't there. Distributions do share patches and setups (or swizzle them from each other, that is what open source is for), there are even cases where an upstream developer is the packager for a distribution, or somebody packages for several distributions. Besides, I just don't see a terrible amount of work when installing something from source... unless the package is very badly done software, in which case the installation troubles are probably just the very beginning of an extremely painful experience. A useful rule of thumb is that if installation is confusing or badly done, the rest of the stuff probably matches, and should be avoided. Yes, I lived in the pre-Linux days, when there were lots of different Unixy systems around, with real differences among them and noone packaging "extraofficial" software. That was real pain. The current situation is tame in comparison.
(Log in to post comments)
|
|
||||||||||||