On Wednesday 19 March 2008 17:37:42 Dan Nicholson wrote: > That's how things currently go, but it's a big mess. Let's say I've > developed my proprietary app on RHEL and now I want to sell it to > some company running Ubuntu. If I want it to be directly installable > for them, I have to port the packaging to dpkg and figure out what > the dependencies are named on Ubuntu at the least. What if I want to > sell it to another company where they use neither RPM nor dpkg? Now > I've got 3 packages to maintain. Or, you could write a script that > handles the details of the install. OK, except now the binaries are > not handled by the native package manager and you require the > sysadmin to be familiar with your unusual install method. > > In both cases, you still need to confirm the package works on systems > X, Y and Z for each release or your customers get angry. > > Because people really want it to be as easy as "here's the Linux > package, install it and go" just like you can do on Windows or Mac. > The important thing to remember is that not every Linux user is a > power user who is intimately familiar with topics like service > initialization, GUI toolkits, packaging, etc. > > If it's me or you, then I would say "too dumb and/or lazy". If it's > my mom, then I say those are details she definitely shouldn't care > about. I certainly understand the notion of the informed person > clicking the "I know what I'm doing" checkbox, but I think the LSB is > helping to make "Just Works" attainable for mere mortals. >
I often forget the (extremely common) case of the average user. Thanks for taking the time to spell it out for me. I guess it's a good thing I'm not a software developor or a full-on distro maintainer. -- Robert Daniels -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
