Small problem for Linux ? Sure. Big problem for Linux user? Of course. [LWN.net]

Small problem for Linux ? Sure. Big problem for Linux user? Of course.

Posted Jul 9, 2009 7:03 UTC (Thu) by Frej (subscriber, #4165)
In reply to: Small problem for Linux ? Sure. Big problem for Linux user? Of course. by khim
Parent article: Google Chrome OS and the community

Almost agree ;) It's basicly imposible to distribute linux software as an ISV (i hate using that term). Sure if you like to manage software or run a server, packages are very nice. But it's all very centralized.

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Small problem for Linux ? Sure. Big problem for Linux user? Of course.

Posted Jul 9, 2009 7:47 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

We manage alright. We have a fairly complicated application that uses Qt and about a dozen other
third party libraries. Our binaries (http://www.hyves.nl/hyvesdesktop/download/) have been
reported to work successfully on many linux distributions.

Of course, we ran into trouble when we wanted to support sound. Qt's phonon uses GStreamer as a
backend and that's a mess. We came to the conclusion that we'd better use QSound, since the
alternative would have been to redistribute the right gstreamer with all plugins ourselves.
Something compiled against a platfrom gstreamer on one distribution will crash on all other
distributions (that we tried).

Sound

Posted Jul 9, 2009 12:52 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

I thought Phonon was a KDE thing, not a Qt thing.

I also thought that the whole point of Phonon was that you don't have to
deal with the underlying Gstreamer (or Xine or whatever) engine at all, so
that engine could be swapped out or upgraded at will, as long as your
Phonon can handle the varying engines. Thus the confusion from Gstreamer
people who thought (wrongly) that Phonon was intended to replace
Gstreamer.

Of course, if you have a Qt app rather than a KDE app, it would seem to
make sense to use Qsound rather than Phonon anyway.

Sound

Posted Jul 9, 2009 13:09 UTC (Thu) by johnflux (subscriber, #58833) [Link]

Phonon was originally KDE, but was moved from KDE into Qt.

Sound

Posted Jul 9, 2009 13:33 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

It's a Qt thing. But at least in Qt 4.4.x it was quite problematic. On WIndows XP, it would play wav
files, which it wouldn't play on WIndow Vista, where phonon would be able to play mp3, which it
wasn't able to play on XP... On OSX everything was fine. And on Linux, an app compiled on Ubuntu,
crashed in gestreamer on OpenSUSE and Fedora -- and all other permutation gave the same result.

We'll have to try again with 4.5 -- 4.5 is in many ways a great series of releases with lots of fixes
and cool things.

Small problem for Linux ? Sure. Big problem for Linux user? Of course.

Posted Jul 9, 2009 13:04 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> Almost agree ;) It's basicly imposible to distribute linux software as an ISV

If your goal is to distribute only one "universal" binary, you are right this is seldom possible. If on the other hand you start from source then it often just works or with only a minor effort.

Porting your source code from one Unix vendor to the other was generally much more difficult than from one Linux distribution to the other. Simply because Linux distributions share most of their underlying source code.

Minor effor for WHO?

Posted Jul 9, 2009 16:16 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

If your goal is to distribute only one "universal" binary, you are right this is seldom possible.

Your goal is to give users something they can use.

If on the other hand you start from source then it often just works or with only a minor effort.

...if you know how to install stuff from source. I was surprised at first when I found few years ago that some of my friends who work as admins don't know C and don't know how to compile programs from source... but then - why should they? It's rarely needed and when it's the only possibility - they can contact me and I'll help them (at first it was for free, later when I've tried to say "enough is enough" they just offered me to pay for my skills and now everyone is happy). If even admins can not compile stuff from source - what chance do you think "Joe Average" will have?

Porting your source code from one Unix vendor to the other was generally much more difficult than from one Linux distribution to the other. Simply because Linux distributions share most of their underlying source code.

Sure - this was the point in article. And my point is that such effort is still required if you are talking about programs for "normal users"... and there are more Linux distributions then there were Unix vendors...

Minor effor for WHO?

Posted Jul 16, 2009 16:08 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]

May I suggest you look at lilypond (www.lilypond.org). They distribute ONE universal binary which is pretty much guaranteed to run on ALL linux distros. (Firefox and OOo do the same ...)

And the tools lilypond uses to do that are open-source...

Cheers,
Wol