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Must ... Not ... Have ... ChoiceMust ... Not ... Have ... ChoicePosted May 10, 2012 9:46 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596)In reply to: Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice by ssmith32 Parent article: Fragmentation on the Linux Desktop (Is it Normal?) (Datamation)
The two are not equivalent. As a developer, if I want to "package" my application for Windows I can do *one* lot of work to create an MSI that any user can run to install my program on any supported version of Windows.
I cannot do this for Linux; I have to build the program on a Debian system to create a Debian package and just hope that Debian-derived distributions don't stray far enough from the latest Debian stable release to break my package; I have to create a separate RPM for Red Hat, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSUSE, etc. Slackware users are out in the cold unless they don't mind extracting the contents of the deb and installing the libraries that it requires themselves. :)
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Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice Posted May 10, 2012 11:38 UTC (Thu) by ean5533 (subscriber, #69480) [Link]
>>Slackware users are out in the cold unless they don't mind extracting the contents of the deb and installing the libraries that it requires themselves. :)
Yeah, but let's be honest: for a Slackware user, extracting a deb is like opening a Christmas present. They really don't mind.
Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice Posted May 14, 2012 2:19 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
or they just use alien to convert the package
Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice Posted May 10, 2012 13:48 UTC (Thu) by smokeing (guest, #53685) [Link]
If I, a developer, want my application reach interested users, I find package maintainers for it, or become one. Debian folks have gone to great lengths making it as simple as possible (but not simpler than that).
No sane Linux user will want anything that hasn't been properly examined, passed QA wrt all dependencies, and packaged by someone competent.
If you want something that's not in your distro, maybe your choice of distro is suboptimal. If you can't find it in any current distro, either you or program author are doing it wrong. Distribution tier exist for a reason.
Gentoo people have a very disparaging word for it: slackwarization. Also, no bug reports will be looked at if your kernel is tainted (notably by nvidia drivers).
Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice Posted May 10, 2012 14:10 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
And that strategy works fine if you are producing (1) free software (2) that does not need to be kept up to date.
In the real world people need to sell proprietary software for a living, and the lack of a decent way to package that up for end users to buy, install and use, has kept Linux on the desktop back all these years.
Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice Posted May 10, 2012 17:31 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
And why is that? For years, all we heard from Miguel de Icaza and the GNOME top table was "ISV, ISV, ISV!" We also heard it from other projects who favoured inferior permissive or weak-copyleft libraries to superior copyleft libraries (I'm thinking of OSAF's Chandler product) because of all the ISVs who would be building proprietary software on their work.
So why didn't all those people championing this lucrative ISV ecosystem get something done to make packaging and deployment easier? It's not as if those people had no skills, influence or money to do the work.
Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice Posted May 10, 2012 22:00 UTC (Thu) by smokeing (guest, #53685) [Link] works fine if you are producing (1) free software In point of fact, this is precisely what I am busy with: produce free software (johnhommer.com/academic/code/aghermann). And so also do countless people small and large, for the common good. (2) that does not need to be kept up to date Maintainers will do it, for some considerable time even after upstream goes AWOL. If there is a sustained demand, they will try really hard; eventually it will be adopted, or someone forks/starts from scratch an alternative, better package serving the same purpose (the story with stow/xstow comes to mind). If in all appearances, a project dies and no one seems to care, then perhaps the purpose is no longer valid, or has never been in the first place (think sundry 'ext2 defragmenters' of around 2000). In the real world people need to sell proprietary software I do programming full time for a living. The single big product we do, has one big university for a single customer, such that we not so much sell the *product* as, rather, sell our time and expertise to please this single customer. Barring idiocyncrasies of certain middlemen in my case, this model works remarkably well. You seem to advocate the proprietary, closed-source model instead. Why do it here? I give you some people do closed source, some even meet with success (Angry Birds?). I, for one, in this same real world, don't, neither in my capacity as user nor as a developer, and I don't feel obliged to accommodate the (inferior) alternative. the lack of a decent way to package that up for end users to buy, install and use Skype is shipped as a deb file in two flavours, statically linked with Qt and standalone. Just don't tell me it's hard to install a deb. The essential problem, again, is this is not distribution done right. has kept Linux on the desktop back all these years I smell slashdot here, thank you.
Must ... Not ... Have ... Choice Posted May 11, 2012 8:21 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
Or you can get an openSUSE Build Service account and let OBS do it for you. It will produce packages from the same source not only for openSUSE, but for Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, and other distributions, too, see http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Build_Service_supported_b...
OBS is one of the most under-reported good services in FOSS land ever.
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