On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Venky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 09:28:10AM -0500, Shawn Walker wrote: >> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 9:20 AM, Venky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> > On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 08:35:07AM -0500, Shawn Walker wrote: >> >> > Source is distribution mechanism for developers. >> >> >> >> No, source is *a* distribution mechanism for developers. It is not >> >> *the* distribution mechanism. >> >> >> >> You will find very few *successful* developers that do not *also* >> >> distribute a binary in addition to source code. >> > >> > Not really. In fact, it would be the not-so-successful developers >> > who supply binaries because their products are not popular enough to >> > merit a distribution maintainer's time. The successful ones push >> > out source and expect the distributions to develop the binary >> > packages. (For instance -- Vim, Emacs, Firefox, Python itself.) >> >> I said *in addition* to source code. >> >> Everyone of those projects you mentioned distribute binaries in >> addition to source. >> >> So how is that disproving the point? > > Well, because none of those projects (other than the > distribution-agnostic tarballs of Firefox) distribute binaries. :) > If anything, they just point you to your favourite distributions > package repository.
I might also point out that is a symptom rather than proof that some projects don't distribute binaries for specific GNU/Linux distributions. I would argue that some developers don't distribute packages for GNU/Linux distributions because it is nearly impossible to generate a binary that will work across different versions of GNU/Linux. For example, I maintain a closed-source, but free, GNU/Linux port of an adventure game runtime engine. I only generate and build binaries for Ubuntu though because I found it was impossible to generate binaries that worked across multiple GNU/Linux distributions. So I think that the non-distribution of binaries by many projects is a symptom rather than a disinterest in doing so. -- Shawn Walker "To err is human -- and to blame it on a computer is even more so." - Robert Orben _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
