I don't think this would be that much of a problem, in fact I would think the trend would tend to go the other way. A software company, such as Corel, who has a massive software package, a-la WordPerfect, isn't going to be quick to change the libraries that it is based upon. At least that's what I would suspect. If I had a large piece of software, changing something as major as the underlying libraries would be pretty low on the totem pole, and would probably not occur until the new libraries were extremely mainstream.
For instance, when I installed Debian, I was sure to include the libc5 libraries just because I had forgotten to install them once before, and was pretty surprised at the host of stuff that wouldn't work without them. The "Official" version of netscape being one. As far as the kernel goes, I wouldn't think that it would be much of an issue for Office-style software, a-la WordPerfect. Besides, my experience with Debian is that it is very similar to Slackware in that if you want to compile and install software that is not yet available in a stable-debianized form, that it will still work pretty well. I'm running the 2.2.5-ac6 kernel, and have had no problems with it, or any of the other >2.0 kernels that I've been running ever since I first installed Debian a year or more ago. I'm also running gtk-1.2.1, and gimp-1.0.4, and have most of the gnome-1.0.5 stuff installed. All of this was compiled from source, and lives in some variant of /usr/local. As these things become available in a debianized package, I usually take them out of /usr/local , and "officially" install them with the .deb package. This is one of the things I've always really liked about Debian, in general. It allows me to run a stable Linux box, with incredible upgrade abilities, while also allowing me to run some cutting edge stuff via compiled source. Of the other dists I've messed with, RedHat gave the the former without the latter, and Slackware the latter without the former. And SuSE, well . . . I utterly despised Yast. Anyway, I guess all I really wanted to say was that I don't think the fact the Debian doesn't 'live on the edge' of development will be a real issue for either Corel or their Linux-software. </babble> Sean Kenneth Scharf wrote: > > One problem that I see is that Debian usually lags behind the other > distributions in getting the latest and greatest into a release. > Debian was the second to get a glibc2 out (only beaten by RedHat) and > will probably be the last to release a distro with a 2.2 kernel as > default (the alpha slink release was the first with glibc2.1, but the > i386 version will lag behind the others). While it is good that Debian > takes its time to 'get it right' having a commerical product based on > Debian could put some pressure on the distro for 'more timely releases' > or worse, a commerical release of an 'unstable' branch might occurr to > 'keep up with the Jones'. > -- E Pluribus Unix
