[bcc: Vess] Hi Nikolay,
Linux compatibility should enable installing of: Mathematica Maple MatLab Oracle as well as Opera. I think Opera is a handy way of seeing how Flash can work. (Despite many partial answers to the annoying Flash problem, Opera seems the easiest). There often are developments in other operating systems that one may wish to use from time to time, until we have a native port, and those of us who feel comfortable in the OpenBSD environment hate to have to run other operating systems to get access to something, even temporarily. At the moment, I am working with an APL specialist to whom I related the ability of OpenBSD to run Linux binaries, and gave a mistakenly rosy picture of how easy this was. In their Linux versions, neither of the two major APL interpreters, APLX and Dialog, seem to work with OpenBSD with Linux emulation turned on, although APLX works for very small data spaces, but hangs up mysteriously when formatting output of matrices of 50 x 50 or larger. The applications intended to be run are complex financial models of interest to Wall Street and the banking industry, and currently being run by it's major users in a Windows environment. My idea, working with the author of the applications, was to first get the APL interpreters working under Linux emulation mode, and later see if we could persuade the APL Interpreter software makers to make native OpenBSD versions. The general idea being: why not run then under OpenBSD since these calculations are supposed to be very secret and sensitive. Not that just running the aps on OpenBSD solves all the problem, which requires network security at many levels, but it would at least sound good for a start. OpenBSD, (I have noticed in my role of handling CD orders), is widely used in network infrastructure in the banking industry, and even by a number of national banks. Since we couldn't get the big blobs (the APL interpreters) to work easily, I thought I would see if some of the Linux utilities in the compatibility package would work before working on the particular APL project. So, sure, if compat_linux is about to be deprecated then we can just forget about it, but I still think that the very large Linux world out there is going to continue to germinate aps that we don't have, and it's nice not to have to change totally to another environment besides OpenBSD to explore them. Anyway, I'd still appreciate your insight, even if only presuming hypothetically, that compat-linux was worth the effort. It would also give me some broader vision of the how to approach issues. Regards, Austin On Tue, 19 May 2009, Nikolay Sturt wrote: > * Austin Hook [2009-05-18]: > > Just curious, which way would you fix it? > > I wouldn't care about it at all. In my opinion the fedora_base package > just exists to make opera and one or two other programs run and that's > it. If tools of the fedora_base package don't work, it doesn't matter, > we don't need them. Linux compat is dying code anyways... > > cheers, > > Nikolay > > -- > "It's all part of my Can't-Do approach to life." Wally >
