On Sat, 06 Feb 1999, you wrote: Ted Harding, Chris Martin, Michael Johnson, Samy Elashmawy, zentara have all brought forward relevant and interesting statements and points of view in this thread. However I think the single most important issue confronting the Linux world is and remains: standardisation of a base Linux system. There has to be agreement on things like file-system structure, the init process, the basic libraries used and preferably also the naming and the contents of the installation 'packages', the placement of these libraries in the file-sytem tree, etc. etc.. If not it will become unnatractive for ISV's not specialized in Linux to also make versions of their software available for Linux. This is the same problem confronting companies who also develop for Unix, you need seperate versions for DEC unix, HP unix, AIX, etc. Even for companies specialized in Linux it will become irritating. (this is the gist of the reaction of SAS when asked about a Linux version of SAS) And then think of the 'average Joe computer user' mentioned by Chris Martin. Joe uses a SuSE 6.0 system and has discovered the ease of working with rpm's. He discovers the rich source of rpm's available for RH and downloads a couple and installs them on his SuSE sytem only to discover that they either do not work or that he has messed up his system. (the fact that we also have other packaging systems for Debian and Stampede is of less importance as long as tools like 'alien' are kept up to date) We should reach a point of agreement on basic structure of Linux where it does not make one iota difference on which distro a rpm was made. [let me quickly add before Michael Johnson berates me: I too don't think that rpms are the answer to everything. But they sure are easy and comfortable for 'average Joe computer user' :-)]. I was already interested in this issue but this interest has been reinforced by at least three 'incidents' this past year where I was confronted with difference between SuSE en RH. At the office I use RH 5.2 (glibc) and at home SuSE 5.3 (libc). Everything I use at the office I also want at home, and vice versa and the glibc-libc issue is the least of the problems. My latest problem concerns the commercial statistical program Stata that I use professionaly. Two weeks ago I received the new Stata 6.0 for Linux and promptly installed it at home and at the office. [up to now Stata was no problem because it was aout, now they have gone ELF]