A lot of whining, little substance [LWN.net]

A lot of whining, little substance

Posted May 21, 2005 16:16 UTC (Sat) by b7j0c (guest, #27559)
In reply to: A lot of whining, little substance by bojan
Parent article: What the Linux Desktop Needs (OS Views)

>> It's just a matter of time before we see more unification in terms of binary compatibility and packaging.

I doubt it, this is in fact getting worse every day with more distros rolling their own package formats and tools. Autopackage? Sure. Who uses it? No one.

The previous posters were correct. If you want your app available for a linux distro, open source it and it will magically appear in repositories. Keep it closed source and you are on your own.

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A lot of whining, little substance

Posted May 22, 2005 6:03 UTC (Sun) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (4 responses)

> I doubt it, this is in fact getting worse every day with more distros rolling their own package formats and tools. Autopackage? Sure. Who uses it? No one.

This is your point of view and I respect it. But, there is always a handful of "major" distros, with a handful of major packaging formats to support. Cutting an RPM spec file is not all the different for various RPM based distros - most times the file can be directly reused. This means that all that is required is a rebuild - a completely automated process. I doubt that proprietary software vendors would trouble themselves with supporting non-mainstream Linux distros. They live and die by the number of licences sold, so they won't see them as important at all.

> The previous posters were correct. If you want your app available for a linux distro, open source it and it will magically appear in repositories. Keep it closed source and you are on your own.

In general, I agree. However, this boils down to the old argument: which is more important - freedom or popularity. If we're talking about freedom (RMS argument) there is no place for proprietary software, so we must be talking about popularity. In other words, if Linux on the desktop is to be popular, it has to be a good platform even for proprietary software vendors (that's the argument made by the original article). So, we have to pick - do we need those proprietary software vendors to supply software for the Linux desktop, or are we confident enough that we'll do fine with open source tools alone.

From my personal experience, I know that it would be really hard (read: impossible) for me to use my Fedora Core box at work if I didn't have access to Flash, Java, Cisco VPN and a whole bunch of other proprietary software for various management tasks on that platform. As it stands, I can get all of these for Linux - therefore my desktop is FC. Otherwise, I'd have to use Windows.

In an ideal world, Macromedia would open source Flash, Sun would open source Java and Cisco would give open source downloads of their VPN client. But the fact (at the moment) is that they don't. I'm sure some people prefer to wait, while others prefer to make the platform proprietary software "friendly".

My beef with the article is that the arguments in it aren't that strong. I've build RPM packages (in my spare time, no less) and I can testify it isn't hard. I also see others doing it in large numbers, so it can't be hard even if I were some kind of of RPM guru (I assure you, no such luck :-).

Another interesting example for me is JPackage (http://www.jpackage.org/), which provides over 1,500 Java related RPMS. I they (some 20 people) can do it, why does the author of the article see such problems with the process?

A lot of whining, little substance

Posted May 22, 2005 16:32 UTC (Sun) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (3 responses)

>> Cutting an RPM spec file is not all the different for various RPM based distros - most times the file can be directly reused.

This is false. Creating an RPM is a reusable process, but the resulting file is not portable between RPM supporting distros. Rarely are they portable even between versions of the same distro.

A lot of whining, little substance

Posted May 22, 2005 22:00 UTC (Sun) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (2 responses)

> This is false. Creating an RPM is a reusable process, but the resulting file is not portable between RPM supporting distros. Rarely are they portable even between versions of the same distro.

I was talking about creating a SPEC file (which is a text file - a script of sorts). One gets binary (and source) RPMS as a result of running a build process against that script. Most spec files (and this is where the work goes) ARE portable between different distros and different versions of the distro.

Don't confuse the RPM with its spec file.

A lot of whining, little substance

Posted May 23, 2005 16:31 UTC (Mon) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (1 responses)

>> I was talking about creating a SPEC file

and what does that buy you? .tgz's are also portable between distros. your argument comes down to nothing more than compiling from source.

A lot of whining, little substance

Posted May 23, 2005 20:01 UTC (Mon) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

The author of the article was whining about great difficulties for ISVs (i.e. peopel with the source for their proprietary software) to support more than one RPM based distro. This is nonsense - all the work goes into creating a single spec file, after which you run rpmbuild against it, which then creates the binary and source RPMs, signs them and finds majority of the dependencies automatically (i.e. you don't have to hard code them at all). If one is clever, the same file can create package versions automatically depending on the distro. All one needs to do is upload them to the web server.

I don't see why that is so hard. And it gets better - there are gazillion SPEC files floating around. Heck, Fedora Extras even has an RPM that creates a template SPEC file according to the Extras guidelines. I would think that ISVs willing to play in the Linux market would be aware of such things...

A lot of whining, little substance

Posted May 22, 2005 23:48 UTC (Sun) by njhurst (guest, #6022) [Link]

Inkscape uses autopackage.

A lot of whining, little substance

Posted May 23, 2005 13:33 UTC (Mon) by jedidiah (guest, #20319) [Link]

Pure Caca.

Commercial developers now have no ability to fully rely on any built-in OS package management. This applies to All Unixes as well as WinDOS. ANY system is going to present the problem of an infinite combination of OS releases and patch updates.

Some vendors even provide special tools to deal with this.

vmware will rebuild it's own kernel modules.

oracle has a relink utility.

And even Java won't insulate you from platform specific quirks.

Anyone trying to make this into a Linux only issue just isn't being honest.

A lot of whining, little substance

Posted May 24, 2005 2:34 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Not exactly. You could still allow volunteers to help, assuming you allow free download (e.g: skype, acrobat reader?)

Binary incompatibility issues indeed require a rebuild. No way around this. But the vendor only needs to release a set of binaries for all platforms.

Volunteers can later package them in e.g. RPMs for their specific distros.
Thisngs like menu files, cron files, location of documentation directory, dependencies and whatever.