[plug] Easy Installation: Linux Desktop Market

[Craig Ringer]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 08:30:40PM +0800, James L. Clarke wrote:
> John,
> 
> As much as I think you're all-round nice bloke and all... I think that your wrong
> on this one about the .package being the solution...
> 
> Any Windows and even Mac zealots, to whom I've show the easy package management
> built into Ubuntu have been truely impressed with how the whole software system
> can be managed from one place, just by simply checking or unchecking a box. It's
> that simple...

Additionally, it's very far from a closed system. It's not overly
difficult to set up a package tree that can be trivially added to the
system, so that packages in that tree can also be installed as if they
shipped as part of the distro.

To me, the real problem is that we're stuck with two major package
formats - deb and rpm; two package managers - dpkg and rpm; and
something like four automatic binary package tools - apt, yum, urpmi,
and yast2. Plus emerge for the always-compile-your-own crowd, and
slackpacks <flamebait>if anybody still cares</flamebait>. On top of this
we have lots of subtle incompatibilities in filesystem locations,
library versioning and naming, config files and tools, etc even within
the RPM distros that make it difficult to produce a single SRPM to just
rebuild for each OS.

I want to stress that I don't think cross-distro binary compatibility is
a big deal anymore. It'd be nice, but I'm increasingly inclined to
believe the costs would to massively outweight the benefits. If it was
possible to build a SINGLE source package format then just auto-rebuild
it on a few major distros (Xen comes in handy here), I suspect that'd be
good enough for many uses.

It'd still make it harder to ship closed source binary packages than for
(eg) win32, but waaay easier than it is now. For open source projects,
they could just post the SRPM (or whatever) and _know_ it's work for all
users of (at least) major distros - also making it trivial to provide
prebuilt binary packages. mm, what a nice thought.

-- 
Craig Ringer