Hello, larrystotler@netscape.net írta:
I've commented about this problem to others, but I would like to hear your thought on it. Why is it neccesssary to have a different RPM of every program for each linux distro as well as each version? It seems like a huge waste of resources to do it this way. On the Windows side, a program will install on most any version of windows or at least on W2k and XP. I've tried downloading and installing RPMs for other distros under SuSE, and sometimes it works, but more often than not it doesn't. I've gotten to the point that I just either install it from source or not update. The Windows situation is something compare able to different versions of SLES and SLED. First of all: there are a lot less packages , with a lot less dependencies. This means, that there are a lot less packages to stay compatible with. Second: these are different versions of the same distribution. So there is a good chance, that if you compile something on an earlier version, it will also work on a later one, as if something did not remain directly compatible, there is a 'compat' package for it. But as even SLES contains more than a thousand of packages, this is true only for a limited number of packages. The problem is (which is actually also a good thing), that there are many Linux distributions. They compile most of their packages with very different settings. So simple packages, like dvdcss.rpm work on most distributions, but those which have more dependency than libc, usually fail due to different version, different compile time options, etc. This can partially be solved by statically linking in dependencies (like Skype), but this is only a fall back, the best solution is still to recompile software for each distribution, version and architecture.
Case in point, my desktop here as v9.2 on it. I had to hunt down an RPM for Firefox for it and install it. I had v1.5.0.3 on here. Then last night, I got a security update to v1.5.0.6 installed by YOU. I don't even know what it did. It definately should not have taken that long to get those updates...... SUSE (and most other distributions) policy is to backport safety fixes to versions, which were in the distribution originally. The version does not change, but the fixes are there. With some applications it's sometimes next to impossible, there one must do the version upgrade sometimes. But the default is to get problems fixed in the original version.
Also, I am still trying to get the "Old World" mac support returned. Do you have any older Macs or know anything about the problems involved? I've offered to help test, but I'm not a programmer, so I can't just go in and fix something. My only PPC machine is this a Pegasos2 based computer. It has Altivec, which is auto detected by most build scripts and I could not find an easy way to turn it off, as I'm also not a programmer. This means, that some of the packages I compile might not run on G3 Macs. Bye, CzP