m h wrote:
Hmmm, I disagree here. Our company is actively looking into
cross-distribution packaging... Because customers are asking for it.
Commercial distribution is an exception. For open source projects,
cross-distribution packaging isn't generally worth the effort. Instead,
open source developers should do their best to make it easy for Linux
distributors to build binaries for them.
On Mac OS X and Windows, developers work hard to support binary
compatibility in support of closed source software. On Linux,
developers don't really mind breaking binary compatibility.
Sorry, I'm not trying to be confrontational, but developers and end
users are often different people. I run gentoo (so obviously I fall
into the developer camp) and I don't run RHEL for probably the same
reasons that an IT guy is going to run RHEL and not gentoo.
The primary feature of the enterprise distributions is that they change
less often that other distributions, giving commercial developers and
users time to keep up. A checkers program does not fall in the
enterprise category. :-)
I only mention this because I once thought it would be a good idea to
make some of my own open source software into a simple Linux binaries
that anyone could run right from the web. I put a lot of effort into
it. In the end, I learned that nearly every binary interface in Linux
is constantly changing--from the kernel, the C library, and the GUI
layers, to the programming language and the countless libraries. I
realized I could waste all my time trying to keep up. (Klik is an
interesting solution, but not ideal.) I decided I'm much better off
just playing my role as an open source developer, which includes the
responsibility of making my stuff attractive to distributors, who would
create binaries for me.
Shane
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