Untz: Results of the App Installer meeting, and some thoughts on cross-distro collaboration

Posted Jan 26, 2011 10:31 UTC (Wed) by renox (guest, #23785)
In reply to: Untz: Results of the App Installer meeting, and some thoughts on cross-distro collaboration by skvidal
Parent article: Untz: Results of the App Installer meeting, and some thoughts on cross-distro collaboration

>> package/app install/updating is critical to how a distro does everything it does. So to suggest more collaboration between distros is to, implicitly suggest collapsing distros together. <<

A baseless assertion: there is a large number of combinations of application and customisations which can be chosen by the distributions!
And these choices are much more important for the users than the package mechanism used by the distribution.

More simply: I don't care at all what type of package the distribution use, I do care that chromium is available and well integrated..

Untz: Results of the App Installer meeting, and some thoughts on cross-distro collaboration

Posted Jan 26, 2011 12:42 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes. All the same distros releases around the same time period use the same kernel versions, gcc versions, X versions... etc etc.

They have a hell of a lot in common. Much more then have in differences.

A lot of the package and software incompatibilities are just caused by relatively insignificant implementation details. Stuff like install location or how the packages are divided up into parts or the versioning scheme used.

Companies and projects that support installing software across multiple distros don't bother compiling them statically or anything weird like that. They will include some libs, but often only because they need special features or versions not typically included by the distros.

For the most part I know I can 90% of the software built for Fedora and have no issues running it on Ubuntu. The biggest barrier is the package management itself.

Untz: Results of the App Installer meeting, and some thoughts on cross-distro collaboration

Posted Jan 26, 2011 19:26 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

> A lot of the package and software incompatibilities are just caused by relatively insignificant implementation details. Stuff like install location or how the packages are divided up into parts or the versioning scheme used.

Insignificant? But, those are exactly the most important things that make a distribution a distribution. Without policies which force unrelated software to work together on a system you are left with the nightmare that you see in windows. The whole point of a distribution is for the package maintainers to think about these things for you. They are the added value of a distribution over simply downloading and installing upstream packages.