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He's not getting itHe's not getting itPosted Jun 18, 2010 1:23 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: He's not getting it by BrucePerens Parent article: The Party of Gno (Linux Magazine)
The solution is just to produce superior software.
If 'Free Software' is to succeed as 'Free software' it needs to produce superior product and out compete.
For example:
Linux distributions are incompatible with one another. Ensuring binary compatibility and a unified package management and so on and so forth is a critical step in growth for Linux, but it has never been done.
Package Management is the solution? NO! Package management is the bandaid and is not the solution! The longer people fool themselves into beleiving that package management is a good substitute for good system design the bigger the problem is getting.
Apple implemented package management system for 'iOS', but unlike Linux they made developer-friendly environment and a developer-friendly OS.
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How many useful applications are in Debian's repositories?
I am not talking about pure packages, no *-dev packages or libraries or any crap like that. I am talking about real swear-to-god applications that people can use for different things.
10 thousand? 20 thousand?
How long has Debian been around? 17 years?
Now compare this to iPhone: 3 years and ~140,000 applications.
Android: One year = 40,000+ applications. Probably will hit 100,000 by the end of the year.
Sure sure these are smaller applications and many are nothing more then trivial fart games or whatever, but the pace of development of those systems far far outstrip anything ever seen on Linux prior to Android.
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What is these platforms doing so well that GNu/Linux is utterly failing at?
One thing for certain is that no end user ever had to recompile a application from scratch to get it to work on their phone...
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He's not getting it Posted Jun 18, 2010 5:54 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
drag, you're smarter than this.
If you're going to claim stuff like "binary compatability is what we need" you need to actually address all the *real* problems that it brings.
He's not getting it Posted Jun 18, 2010 11:02 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> If you're going to claim stuff like "binary compatability is what we need" you need to actually address all the *real* problems that it brings.
If I understood the problem better then I'd be able to do that.
I know that the oil spilling into the gulf is a problem, but I don't know how to fix it. But it's still a problem, right?
It's the same thing with applications on the Linux desktop. Packages should be done by upsteam, as part of normal build process, and collected by distributions. Those packages should be installable on any Linux desktop I happen to come across. It's probably acceptable that newer packages will have a cut-off for how old the system they will run easily on and there is going to be a cut-off on how new of a system that will be supported.
I know that this is how package systems should really work.
People here tell me that diversity is good, choice is good, and all that. Which is, generally, something that is easy to agree with.
But I just fail to see the advantage that not being able to install Ubuntu packages on Fedora brings me, as a end user. I know that they are using just about the same kernel versions, similar gcc versions, similar libc libraries, simple gtk/qt libraries, upstart, etc etc. I bet that for the vast majority of packages in Ubuntu or Fedora's latest releases everything less then a year difference in terms of upstream releases.
I don't understand everything, obviously. But what is so much better about Fedora's C++ ABI over the one that Ubuntu has? What is the big win in one vs the other? Is it really a problem?
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I know that I can download the Blender 2.5 alpha release in a tarball and it 'just works' in Debian. But if I try to install packages built for Ubuntu it won't. http://www.graphicall.org/builds/
What is the big win in Ubuntu or Debian that requires users to deal with these sort of incompatibilities between the systems?
In this case the package management system is a huge lose for me. In Windows I can download the zip release and it'll 'just work'... And the tarball binary version will work also. I know that for Debian the the packages for Ubuntu won't really, at least not any of the half a dozen I tried. Apt-get itself is very unhelpful in this regard.
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Here is another example:
Opera browser...
If you go to Opera's website they offer package formats for all sorts of different Linux versions.
http://www.opera.com/download/
And one may think.. Aha! Opera cares about the end users so they are willing to put the work int producing packages for all these different systems.
Well on more careful examination it quickly becomes apparent that except for one system that uses QT4, all the binaries supplied in the packages are _exactly_the_same_. There is some differences in code paths and in package metadata, of course.
But as far as the actual executable goes they are all using the same exact _dynamically_linked_ Linux executable!
And again the tarball works just fine on my system.
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Ditto for Firefox...
Yeah they include a lot of libs with the release, but if you only use the Firefox-specific libs for things like libxul and use system libs whenever possible it'll still work.
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So I know what I saying is certainly possible. Blender, Operah, and Firefox are far from simple programs and yet they can produce binaries that will work across multiple Linux distributions. Sure there is probably extract work that goes into making this happen and it's probably not trivial, but it's certainly possible.
LSB? (was: He's not getting it) Posted Jun 18, 2010 11:28 UTC (Fri) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
Isn't the LSB designed to be such a common packaging format? I have never actually tried it, but from what I read most of the work is already done.
LSB? (was: He's not getting it) Posted Jun 18, 2010 12:27 UTC (Fri) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
LSB mandates RPM, which is not my idea of how compatibility should be assured.
LSB? (was: He's not getting it) Posted Jun 18, 2010 13:08 UTC (Fri) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link]
> LSB mandates RPM, which is not my idea of how compatibility should be assured.
This isn't exactly true. LSB mandates RPMv3 or an installer which is itself LSB-compliant.
LSB? (was: He's not getting it) Posted Jun 19, 2010 7:41 UTC (Sat) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]
Not to mention that the actual format of the package is actually not even the problem
We still have to consider naming schemes and separation guidelines, and other packaging issues (e.g. Fedora's non-bundled system libs).
Just getting everyone to play RPM doesn't help. Just Try installing a fedora rpm on a suse or mandriva box to find out.
LSB? (was: He's not getting it) Posted Jun 18, 2010 13:03 UTC (Fri) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
Are there any applications that actually make use of the LSB package format? If I buy a game for Linux, today, I'll get an executable shell script that will perform some arbitrary actions to drop the game on my filesystem, register it with the freedesktop.org menu, etc. Not an RPM.
LSB? (was: He's not getting it) Posted Jun 19, 2010 4:45 UTC (Sat) by da4089 (subscriber, #1195) [Link]
LSB is a set of minimum guarantees for things an LSB-compliant system will provide.
But it's so minimal as to be useless. Last time I tried to package an LSB-compliant application, it didn't provide libxml, OpenSSL, zlib, etc.
So your application has to package all of that stuff internally.
And then, in 6 months (or 18 months for enterprise folks), the whole crop of sexy stuff (think of changes like Xorg, PulseAudio, DBus, etc) that's available for native packages isn't available to your LSB application.
It's a well-meaning, but busted model.
He's not getting it Posted Jun 18, 2010 16:31 UTC (Fri) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]
> But what is so much better about Fedora's C++ ABI over the one that Ubuntu has?
They use the same one, and the C++ shared libraries are backward compatible and have been for about 6 years.
I suspect all that's done by Opera and Firefox is to compile and link on a non-bleeding edge OS, so that the shared lib dependencies are suitably old that they can be found on any suitably recent system. It's not rocket science.
iPhone =/= Debian app Posted Jun 18, 2010 9:39 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
The _vast_ majority of iPhone apps are basically analogous to web pages, not Debian applications.
Remember when the web "took off". Every double-glazing sales company, rat catcher and accountant wanted a web site right away. They'd all call up some spotty kid who happened to know a bit of HTML and he'd make them their very own web site for a reasonable price. And then they'd go pay the sign painter to write "Threepalmvalleycentralheating.obscureisp.com" on the side of their vans.
The spotty kid would eventually figure out that he's paying himself minimum wage because he's lousy at business finance and he's no longer excited about making web pages, and the rat catcher would figure out that the web isn't bringing in much business. But meanwhile business was "booming".
That's where the iPhone is now. Countless people have breathlessly told me that they're now an iPhone developer, and hey that means they can buy a new iThing every couple of months and see it as a business expense, and oh, the money? Well they don't have the money part figured out yet. In 18 months most of them will be back working for the Man. But meanwhile they're generating thousands of me too apps, and more importantly, tens of thousands of very niche special purpose apps for just a handful of people, which outside the Reality Distortion Field would have just been web pages (especially since they often don't work without Internet access)
Imagine if there were debian packages like view-lwn-kinda-like-a-web-browser.deb and view-phoronix-sorta-like-a-web-browser.deb would you be more impressed and believe Debian was going to explode in popularity? Or would you think its developers had gone crazy? For Debian thousands of worthless packages is a cost, so they're against it. For Apple every "Hello, world" app is money in the bank.
iPhone =/= Debian app Posted Jun 18, 2010 13:52 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Once again, someone posts a great comment that succinctly dissects the hype around something in a way that no-one else has managed to do! In this case the bubble is iWhatever applications, and Apple, like the various banks and venture capital houses in the dot-bomb era, is the player skimming off the cream while the champagne is still flowing.
iPhone =/= Debian app Posted Jun 19, 2010 4:40 UTC (Sat) by bartszyszka (guest, #67794) [Link]
I don't think your analogy to websites during the dot-com bubble works exactly. During the dot-com bubble, people gave everything away for free without a business model, running on borrowed time until the investors' money ran out. With iPhone apps, the actual customer pays for what the developer makes (with Apple taking a cut, they are a business afterall). I, as a consumer, pay $9.99 for an iPhone app and the developer gets a majority of that money and developers make real profits. That's a big deal. There are very few websites people are willing to pay even a dollar for.
iPhone =/= Debian app Posted Jun 19, 2010 8:11 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
Sure, but the developer paid several hundred developers this year, and so did you, to Apple. And both of you are going to pay several hundred dollars again, when the next revs comes out in another couple of years. That's a bigger deal.
iPhone =/= Debian app Posted Jun 19, 2010 8:49 UTC (Sat) by asaz989 (subscriber, #67798) [Link]
Spot-on article. On a side note, this is what I think is behind Apple's promotion of web standards - they don't think that the iPhone-app craze is sustainable, if only because people now have non-Apple smartphones and developers will not put in that much effort for a smaller bite of the mobile market. Apple wants the iPhone to still have consumer appeal if and when sites realize that web pages should be designed for web browsers (perhaps with a touch-screen version or stylesheet), and not for any specific platform.
iPhone =/= Debian app Posted Jun 19, 2010 16:21 UTC (Sat) by job (guest, #670) [Link] Hardly. Apple's appreciation of web standards is because they've been on the wrong side Internet Explorer, and that hurt.
Debian is not a good comparison (was: He's not getting it) Posted Jun 18, 2010 11:21 UTC (Fri) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
Debian's repository is not a good comparison target. At least for "main", the packages have to meet a fairly strict set of rules, and need to be (at least in theory) maintained by at least one Debian developer. While for "non-free" (and "contrib") the rules are more relaxed, they (and the need for one Debian developer) are still enough to reduce the amount of programs which are packaged.
A better comparison would be with all packages at http://freshmeat.net/; but even then, it will miss a large number of the non-free software available for Linux (especially the more specialized software).
He's not getting it Posted Jun 18, 2010 16:19 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]
> What is these platforms doing so well that GNu/Linux is utterly failing at?
So well ? If you remove free software from them, they become useless bricks.
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