Le Mar 2 octobre 2007 23:47, Mathias Bauer a écrit : > I still don't understand why providing rpms or debs directly isn't > acceptable but I don't need to understand everything. ;-)
Sometimes it's better not to ask :) My poor and incomplete explanation would be: 1. every major distribution values internal consistency (a distro job is to turn lots of different sources in a coherent whole, so strong internal convergence forces are needed to succeed) 2. at the same time, distributions are different. That's a direct result of different past and present priorities, and a good thing (that means different distributions explore different problems at any given time, and you get healthy competition) 3. 1+2 means a distro will greatly prefer its own peculiarities over some middle ground of distribution practices 3. OO.o would inevitably choose this middle ground, and anger everyone (another option is to try to serve everyone with a set of targeted packages, but since a third-party will be hard-pressed to emulate a set of distros perfectly that does not work too well either) 4. since every self-respecting distro will package all the stuff it uses given the chance, angering everyone would serve no purpose ;) What's somehow confusing from the outside is that distribution divergence is a self-regulating mechanism: be too close to another distro and you're not providing any added value for users to choose you instead of the others, diverge too much and the costs of reusing stuff other distributions create become prohibitive. That's why the basic requirements for a project to be easily picked up by distributions are the same, and at the same time going the last mile and creating native package instead of distributions is not a good idea. It's interesting to see Solaris is quickly distrofying, with SUN both hyping its valuable differenciators (zfs…) and trying to get close enough to benefit from network effects (Indiana…). -- Nicolas Mailhot --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
