Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3103 mails)

[Derek Fountain <derekfountain@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I think this conversation is just a bunch of FUD and excuse for why
> someone can't do something. Linux doesn't have to be static for years
> and years to get people to port software to it. That's a bunch of crap
> in my book. And as of late RH, Mandrake and SuSE are pretty much on the
> same track together. So as long as the company making the app has some
> knowledge of how things work in the environment they are developing
> in..then it shouldn't make much of a difference.

You may think it's "FUD" and "crap", but Shawn Gordon doesn't, and he's the 
guy doing it. I've been looking into it, and he's right. As he said:

"The current situation is an absolute and utter nightmare. When we started 
three and a half years ago you could make an RPM and pretty much without 
exception any RPM based system could use it. Now not only are RPMs not 
compatible between distributions, they aren't even compatible between 
versions of distributions. Here's a list of the packages we have to make for 
a single program for it to work properly across linux distributions without 
making 100MB static builds:

    * gcc 2.95 static and shared
    * gcc 3.2 static and shared
    * RedHat 7.2, 7.3, 8.0
    * Mandrake 8.1, 8.2, 9.0
    * SuSE 7.3, 8.0, 8.1
    * Slackware 8.0, 8.1
    * Caldera 3.1
"

Read the article at 
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/01/15/1042520666517.html

-- 
Microsoft Palladium: "Where the hell do you think YOU'RE going today?"