This isn't new

Posted Jul 17, 2012 9:24 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: This isn't new by johannbg
Parent article: Left by Rawhide

Which is yet another reason why distributions need to keep their scope limited, maintain standardized APIs across distributions, and have the upstream developers themselves package the software.

There is no way that you can expect a OS to bundle everything that everybody would possibly want run on it. Extensibility is important and users lack the knowledge, time, and drive to port and compile the software they want to use themselves.

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This isn't new

Posted Jul 17, 2012 19:40 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

But equally, you can't expect an upstream developer to package the program for every possible distribution and architecture. Even expecting the upstream developer to support two is a losing proposition, since most people will have one distro that they use regularly.

Is there some way the distros and the upstreams can meet halfway? Source code could be distributed in a standard source package format, which as well as the usual configure script contains metadata about what files are built, what libraries are required and so on. This in turn can generate source packages for rpm, dpkg, Gentoo and so on using translator tools maintained by each distro. This would not be appropriate for core packages, which usually have a lot of distro-specific hacking, but for the long tail of applications and libraries it could bridge the gap between 'distro must package all possible programs' and 'upstream muat package for all possible distros'.

This isn't new

Posted Jul 20, 2012 10:57 UTC (Fri) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]

You never tried to say "no" to a packager. Most of them all go with a frenzy phase of "let's add as much stuff we can to the distro, because users ask for it and threathen to go elsewhere". Then, that go to "we need more packager to take care of that", then "we need more QA and people doing the boring bits", except that boring stuff are not done, because that's boring.

A solution would be to take in account ressources as a whole, ie, you cannot upload a package unless there is enough people to take care for QA and updates.

But such view are far from being popular IMHO ( and most users do not care, like most do not care about sustainability ).