On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Austin Gonyou wrote:
> Couldn't an InstallAnywhere installer be used so that it will work on ANY
> distribution? or perhaps distribute it as a Shar?
I'll bite.
<rant having nothing to do with W4L>
As a programmer involved in commercial software development for Linux, I
can tell you this would be very time consuming and difficult.
First is binary compatibility: while basically all distributions ship
glibc2.1, there are differences in other libraries (X11, libstdc++,
PAM, libgmp, gtk/glib/gnome, kde/qt, etc), that can cause
incompatibilities. Basically, if your application requires anything other
that ld.so and libc.so, you had better provide it, which of course leads
to significant bloat.
Second is system integration (installation). Each distribution of linux
introduces major differences in filesystem layout, inittab setup
(runlevels), module configuration, etc. For example, on most US
distributions, runlevel 3 is multi-user network, and runlevel 5 is
multi-user, network, with X. But in SUSE (German based), these runlevels
do something completely different (it's been a couple of years, but I
think 5 was reboot). Obviously, if you want to integate a startup script
into the system boot sequence, you have to be sure where you want to put
it, and get the sequence right.
All of this makes things fairly difficult on an ISV (Independent Software
Vendor). You can only provide out-of-the-box support for a couple of
major distributions. You try to avoid anything that causes complete
incompatibilty with your-favorite-distribution-here, and hope that the
users of the other distributions can figure out the integration issues.
Not that I'm complaining. The Linux culture is obviously one of freedom
and choice. I see the distribution choices available as a strength of
Linux, not a weakness. It's just a pain....
</rant>
--
Richard Fish Enhanced Software Technologies, Inc.
Sr. Software Engineer 2920 E Camelback Rd Suite 250
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Phoenix, AZ 85016
(602) 470-1115 http://www.estinc.com
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