On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 10:24:10AM -0500, Shawn Walker wrote: > 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.
True, that is part of the problem. The more important one IMO, is that it is up to distributor/maintainer and not the developer to make choices on how the package is built. Debian and Ubuntu both use the same package format, but Debian packages tend to be more conservatively built as compared to Ubuntu's. Some distributions tend to prefer performance over stability and the same packages tend to be built with aggressive compiler optimization flags. That would not work for more conservative, enterprise-friendly distributions. The whole point of having configure scripts for GNU packages is because there is no "one right way" to build them. Venky. _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
