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

A lot of whining, little substance

Posted May 22, 2005 5:33 UTC (Sun) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
In reply to: A lot of whining, little substance by mmarq
Parent article: What the Linux Desktop Needs (OS Views)

Actually, he is a very clever guy (and he does have others helping - I exaggrated a bit in my original post :-). But there is nothing fishy about the numbers at all, because he built a build harness that makes building all those packages a breeze. If you don't believe the numbers, simply visit this page:

http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/packages.php

And have wget (or whatever tool you like) at it to download every single package. Then count them.

But my point is something else. Building packages with RPM (especially once you get the hang of it) is really easy. For instance, once Fedora Core 4 hits release, Dag will simply run his build process again, therefore generating majority of packages for FC4. There are a few that are bound to break, so he'll adjust the harness and move on.

There is another point to be had here. If proprietary software vendors wish to build their software more easily, I'm sure Dag and others are more than willing to help them with that. For a fee, of course...

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A lot of whining, little substance

Posted May 23, 2005 3:13 UTC (Mon) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] (1 responses)

" But there is nothing fishy about the numbers at all... "

That way of course not ! He appears to be making RPMS for RED HAT centered stuff only. If he had to support the most popular 50% part of the more than 100 Distros out there than he's brain had already exploded long time ago.

A lot of whining, little substance

Posted May 23, 2005 10:28 UTC (Mon) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Yes, for sure. But neither he nor proprietary software vendors have to do that (i.e. they don't care about something that commands very little market, if any). They only need to support a handful of RPM based distros, for which they can usually have a SINGLE spec file which will build against any of these distros.

Bottom line, the author of the article is greatly exaggerating the difficulty of supporting more than one distro.