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

Posted Jan 27, 2011 0:17 UTC (Thu) by garloff (subscriber, #319)
In reply to: Untz: Results of the App Installer meeting, and some thoughts on cross-distro collaboration by rahulsundaram
Parent article: Untz: Results of the App Installer meeting, and some thoughts on cross-distro collaboration

> If Firefox 4 releases tomorrow and I am using Windows or Mac OS X, I can
> install it immediately and in Linux, one usually has to upgrade their
> entire distribution.

You happen to not have spotted openSUSE Build Service yet.
It's dead simple to build packages for various distributions that you can simply drop in to older distros.

The main limiting factor here is that once you build on newer shared
infrastructure it becomes more tedious ... but the FFox4 example is one
where this works rather easily.

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

Posted Jan 27, 2011 0:23 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

I am aware of that as I have already indicated before but If I am a end user, I don't want to be building packages in any build service. That's just ridiculous. If it is not in my distribution repository then I just want to install Firefox 4 from a obvious place. mozilla.org would the most obvious location.

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

Posted Jan 27, 2011 0:27 UTC (Thu) by garloff (subscriber, #319) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, I don't suggest end users should build most of their software themselves. But someone can do it. Most obvious choice would be the
upstream community itself.

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

Posted Jan 27, 2011 1:57 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Upstream has enough work cut out for them just getting the base to work (and fix bugs), asking them to also track whatever a few hundred (eo even just a dozen "mainstream") distributions are up to is just over the top.