On Tuesday 10 May 2005 16:29, Peter B Van Campen wrote:
However, other generic rpms like acroread, BitTorrent, ICAClient will work. Except many of them won't create menu entries in the right places (if at all).
Hi,
Doesn't LSB (Linux Standard Base) compliance figure into this question too?
Yes, it does. You have good chances to get a foreign .rpm running on a _comparable_ version from SUSE. That is if the other distro has the same versions of libraries. If it's older of newer, then chances diminish. But don't compare distro versions, compare component versions. Like kernel, glibc, kde, gnome. And about the menu entries, there's XDG, a relatively new standard promoted by freedesktop.org that KDE, Gnome and Window Maker have begun using. In all this picture that is really going in the right direction, contrary to what some of you guys think, there is another element: software "ported" from Windows, by Windows-loving companies, that started to do some stuff on Linux, because of market pressure. An experienced Linux-er can easily tell when a rpm or .tar.gz is made by one of those companies. They do it "the Windows way", they don't always know about the Linux standards. Now, there's no need to be mean to them :-) after all they have shown goodwill, but they sure do need to be told how things are supposed to be done right in Linux.