[plug] Controversial comparison of distros?

[Cameron Patrick]

On Mon, Oct 27, 2003 at 11:29:20AM +0800, John Knight wrote:
| And tomato boy here is going to point out how much he hates distro 
| dependent packaging and advocate projects like autopackage, distro 
| independent packaging, wooooo! :)

Interesting... distro-independent packaging sounds like an absolute
nightmare to implement such that it actually works.  Binary
compatibility is (perhaps regrettably) not seen as much of an issue by a
lot of Free software types.  The main problem I can see with an alternate
packaging system like the one you described in the article is that users
then have to contend with _two_ different installation systems: the one
provided by their distribution, and the new "user friendly" one.
Software could potentially have been installed with either system, and
unless you're very lucky the two systems may not be aware of the
existence of the other.

Windows systems have much less variation between them than Linux systems
do.  Additionally, many people would be upset if there exist obscure (or
even not so obscure) features of apt/dpkg/rpm/... that aren't present in
any new system.

Cameron.

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