Distro non-wars... was Re: [plug] Red Hat

[James Devenish]

In message <Pine.LNX.4.56.0309222059590.25249 at cyllene.uwa.edu.au>
on Mon, Sep 22, 2003 at 09:28:44PM +0800, Denis Brown wrote:
> In other words and to state the obvious, they all have a kernel, they
> all have file system utilities, they all offer a range of services
> (daemons for ftp, ssh/telnet) they all offer some form of graphical
> user interface (Xfree plus a desktop or two or three), choice of web
> server, mail agents and so on.

Granted.

> But when all is said and done, could I not take a native "RedHat"
> installation and by dint of swapping one desktop for another, one set of
> wallpaper for another, tweaking the security, turning off (or adding)
> services, etc, etc turn it into a Debian installation as far as look and
> feel is concerned.

It will be harder than you might be currently imagining.

> Others in past threads have also eluded to specific distributions being
> preferred because of similar "constraints" from other software.   Pardon
> my naivety, but is this really a limitation?   Aren't we really talking
> about "hooks" into the OS such as library revision levels, which need not
> be the province of a specific OS vendor or flavour?   Ergo it should not
> matter which distro a developer "prefers" - they should all be capable of
> working??????

You might be surprised. It *is* possible to produce products that will
work under arbitrary Linux distributions. However, it requires actual
care on the part of developers. In particular, there are areas where
these is simply no consensus. When we talk of "distrbutions" we usually
mean "operating systems" -- although the kernel and GNU utils are common
to all distributions, there is a vast realm of issues for which there is
no canonical configuration. For example, different distributions apply
their own patches to software; different distributions write their own
manual pages. Some, like RedHat, have a particular penchant for bad
default settings (hmmm,...I guess I've been burnt more than a few times
by RedHat!). Just look at something like Debian policy documents to
realise the vast decision-making that every distribution makes. Don't
mention glibc. This is not to say there's anything "wrong" with this
situation per se -- the situation exists because everyone has different
needs. On the other hand, there are some "reliable" things such as
POSIX, X11, gcc, and so forth which make it much more practical than
porting to, say, Windows (and clearly porting to Windows is possible for
a lot of software). However, just look at this:
<http://www.linux-debian.de/openoffice/>. There's probably no reason why
any software for one free Linux OS (e.g. RedHat) could not be supported
on another free Linux OS (e.g. Debian) but it could very well take
effort. On the other hand, it might just work the first time  The
problem for commercial products is that although your software might run
absolutely perfectly on all OSes, you can't know this for certin unless
you actually try it.


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