On Sep 13, 2012, at 11:35 AM, Cowboy <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thursday 13 September 2012 11:09:27 am Gregg Wonderly wrote: >> When I first started to look at Rivendell, it struck me as strange that >> there was so much variation between distros, that there were large blog like >> pages, covering the installation procedures. > > Why ? > Today, when anyone can be a "star" by writing their own operating system, > the surprising thing is that there are *only* 600 or so different operating > systems > that all run over the Linux kernel. ( including mine ) > With so many people all running in different directions, there should be > no surprise that there are such wide variances.
This is probably something that should be discussed on a Linux distro forum, but here's my beef. Overall, I've been a fedora or red hat or centos user for the past 20 years or so. I've been able to get done what I've needed with those distros, and have experienced the "consistency" of packaging associated with doing that. What I've never liked about the "rest of the linux crowd", is the "separation" that each distro has taken from "red hat". RPM support in particular, and the disassociation from a common packaging and distribution mechanism (yum vs apt-get etc), just makes it harder for people to "use" your distribution. The rivendell deployment to different distros is a great example of how time consuming it can be. I can't go get "just any" 32-bit or 64-bit build of anything I need and install it. rivendell can't just "depend" on a set of rpms that will automatically be found and downloaded. I've not used UBUNTU before, but it has the majority of the audio packages available. But, it is using a BSD based tool set, and I prefer a sys-v tool set. So many variations create all kinds of frustrations and limit the acceptance of Linux in general. If I can download the source, type "configure" and then "make install", and have something ready to go, then it seems completely insane that an appropriate RPM could not exist. Yes, versioning can be an issue, but even that can be handled by properly named RPMs. >From the kernel version to the low level libraries to the other dependencies, >there really should be a common dependency resolution mechanism across all >distros so that it is just "simple" to go get one of the 1,000s of packages >for linux that are available today, and install it. Having a distro specific >build and versioning mechanism is, to me, a cop-out that makes it possible to >"create" a distro, but provides the separation pressure that is not helpful. In a sense, I'm thinking of an "library" kind of mechanism where things can be "registered" and "located". Of course, it this day and age, most people want to spend some time looking at what they are downloading, before just "running" it. But of course, many people don't do too much validation. >> The "appliance" version seems to be the most attractive for people without >> experience in Linux administration. > > And that's why it was created ! And overall, it's a good thing. I did have to spend time installing additional things I believe. Isn't it missing mpeg-layer2 support? > >> But even it can have problems depending on what you do to edit certain >> files. > > So can anything at all. > That's why pertinent documentation is so important. > That's also why rolling your own, although remaining an option, > isn't necessarily always a good idea. I'm the kind of person that believes that if you have to write more than a page of documentation for something, then you missed out on some form of automation or tooling which could have kept 1,000 people from spending an hour each to read your 20page document. I know it's not always possible to "guess" every variation you need to deal with, but in the end, people want to use your "package", so they will likely not appreciate having to read more than a page, and may go do something different if they have to. Gregg > -- > Cowboy > > http://cowboy.cwf1.com > > "Just once, I wish we would encounter an alien menace that wasn't > immune to bullets" > -- The Brigader, "Dr. Who" > > _______________________________________________ > Rivendell-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.rivendellaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/rivendell-dev _______________________________________________ Rivendell-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.rivendellaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/rivendell-dev
