Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:
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.
Mandrake/Mandriva versions are always close to SuSE in the main components, but as I earlier demonstrated, they will alter the sources to suit themselves, so the equivalent versions of a package won't necessarily install.
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.
An actual example where you hit problems building from source ..... svxlink fails to build on SuSE because the gsm library used by SuSE has its origin in germany and it's not the one used by the other distros, so you have to build the more widely used and generic libgsm in order to build and run that package on SuSE. The developer at one stage adopted my changes, including libgsm, so it built on all distros including SuSE, but the latest version has rolled back the libgsm change, he was a bit dismissive, so I had to send him a copy of my original email as reminder of what was said back then. There is a real problem, hence the startup of http://rpmforge.net which aims initially to provide spec files for building standard packages for all distros, deliver packages for each distro and hopefully arrive at a stage where an agnostic spec file can be generated, suited to all distros and more likely rpms that are distro agnostic. The source files are more often than not capable of being built on any distro, but the distros at times do strange things that ensure their source versions won't build on another distro. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Keen licensed Private Pilot Retired IBM Mainframes and Sun Servers Tech Support Specialist Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux for all Computing Tasks