Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems
Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems
Posted Sep 1, 2014 12:52 UTC (Mon) by dvdhrm (subscriber, #85474)In reply to: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems by cjcoats
Parent article: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems
> And what about those few of us who write small-niche compile-and-run
> software like environmental models -- I have only a few thousand
> clients worldwide, I don't have the resources for all these builds on
> who knows how many versions of what distributions, and the clients
> don't either -- it looks like he's freezing us out: Linux for the
> masses (only), and niche users can just forget about it.
> software like environmental models -- I have only a few thousand
> clients worldwide, I don't have the resources for all these builds on
> who knows how many versions of what distributions, and the clients
> don't either -- it looks like he's freezing us out: Linux for the
> masses (only), and niche users can just forget about it.
I'm not sure where you got that from, but this is definitely not the intention of the proposal. On the contrary, "small-niche compile-and-run software" should benefit from this, as you can provide your application as a bundle that can just run, instead of requiring package-descriptions for each distribution.
Obviously, this relies on other distributions to support such bundles. Otherwise, it just becomes one more package you need to provide.
Also note that users are free to run package-managers on top of this system. Sure, /usr will be read-only, but you're free to install traditional packages into /opt/ or /home/<user>/.local/ just like you do right now.