Free Software: the road to a Universal bundle, a powerful app store, and world domination (Free Software Magazine)

Posted Jan 5, 2011 3:00 UTC (Wed) by rich0 (guest, #55509) [Link]

The difference between Android and linux is that there is only one flavor of Android from a packaging standpoint (one package will work on all variants of android).

With linux there is no single standard for packages to target. The only way that would work is if something like java were used (single api/classlib/etc), or static linking. There are issues with both of these approaches. Static linking of course brings security issues and wastes RAM. Java is fine, as long as the classlib/APIs/etc are adequate and you don't need the performance of native code.

The other issue is which linux distro do you pick? I'm sure Canonical and Red Hat have no desire to make their distros redundant with each other. So, this becomes a case of the nice thing about standards being that there are so many to choose from...

Free Software: the road to a Universal bundle, a powerful app store, and world domination (Free Software Magazine)

Posted Jan 5, 2011 5:24 UTC (Wed) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152) [Link] (2 responses)

Actually, making DEBs and RPMs is quite easy. However going from zero with the existing HOW TOs is not funny so I understand your frustation. But once one greps the concept it is actually very easy.

What I think that we really need is a build server, either a local one or a hosted one, to which one could supply a tarball and out would come DEPs and RPMs for dozens of distributions and architectures.

SUSE has something like that but the supported distributions are not that great AFAIK.

Free Software: the road to a Universal bundle, a powerful app store, and world domination (Free Software Magazine)

Posted Jan 5, 2011 6:45 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

take a look at checkinstall, it does a pretty good job of going from 'make install' to having a .deb or .rpm package that you can use.

you will usually want to modify the package it created (to define dependancies etc) but as a bootstrap, it's very useful

Free Software: the road to a Universal bundle, a powerful app store, and world domination (Free Software Magazine)

Posted Jan 5, 2011 8:40 UTC (Wed) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link]

> SUSE has something like that but the supported distributions are not that great AFAIK.

Yes, tried it, and it was very cryptic.

Free Software: the road to a Universal bundle, a powerful app store, and world domination (Free Software Magazine)

Posted Jan 5, 2011 20:35 UTC (Wed) by talex (guest, #19139) [Link] (1 responses)

> This is very true. While one can easily make an .exe installer which
> would happily work on pretty much all Windows versions, one should
> possess very strong maintainer skills to create a bunch of different
> packages for a bunch of different distros/flavors/arches. When I faced
> this problem as a developer myself, I just gave up - I've made a single
> .exe for happy Windows users and a single tarball for everyone else. I
> couldn't even master a single deb file - even that was just too complex
> for me to invest time in it.

What extra features did you want over the plain tarball? Automatic updates? Dependency handling? Digital signatures?

Would http://0install.net have helped here? It should just be a case of putting up a signed XML file saying where your tarball is, which file inside it to run, and any dependencies you want handled.

Free Software: the road to a Universal bundle, a powerful app store, and world domination (Free Software Magazine)

Posted Jan 6, 2011 7:10 UTC (Thu) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link]

> What extra features did you want over the plain tarball?

Me personally? None, of course. Users? They just wanted an easily installable package for their distro.

Free Software: the road to a Universal bundle, a powerful app store, and world domination (Free Software Magazine)

Posted Jan 6, 2011 13:42 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Oh, come on. Not even Microsoft can build packages that work on all their systems (got burned by a game by MS that was supposed to run on every then-current system, that could be installed but never got past the spash screen). And that with massive effort by them to keep "important" legacy applications working (i.e., bug-for-bug compatibility). This "it is easy to create a Windows application that runs everywhere" is true just as long as that means the same version. Even service packs do break applications badly.