-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Thursday 06 November 2003 12:57, Gerard Beekmans wrote: > On Thu, 2003-11-06 at 12:49, Kevin Anderson wrote: > > Totally understood. I alluded to this near the end of the message, where > > I said they probably would run, but getting them to do so was beyond my > > current skill level. > > Oh ok sorry, missed that paragraph.
=) it isn't just skill level issues, of course... not only will you have to tweak libraries (and the lower in the library stack you go to do so, the more you have to disturb the rest of your install), but depending on the software you may also need to change your directory layout, the format of common files. the more complex the software, the higher the chances are that you need to do a lot of fiddling. since most closed source software worth using tends to be more complex, this is often the case. this isn't theory, either, as anyone who has tried installing Oracle on the "wrong" version(s) of Red Hat will be able to tell you ;-) and of course, there won't be much (e.g. 0) in the way of documentation on how to do this. for a business, that means money (== time), increases the chances of breakage (not what you want in a production environment). so while you can get away with it for small things like web browser plugins with just a wee bit of annoyance, for things like Oracle forget it. then there's the issue of technical support. a company's support desk will likely just say "Sorry" and hang up on you if you tell them you are running their software on an OS they don't support... all in all, it does mean that a supported platform is ++important in production business environments. THAT said....... the light at the end of the tunnel are projects such as the LSB. at full fruition, the LSB should allow any distro to qualify as "supported" should the makers of the distro follow the LSB guidelines. - -- Aaron J. Seigo GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2-rc1-SuSE (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE/rAh51rcusafx20MRAn77AJ9YNzSe7IzgdZxI+C8PnuDUX79WCwCfS5Yq A6wkWZp3zc4RMuBhgcI5Mm4= =rLo+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
