[plug] Easy Installation: Binary Compatability

[Tim Bowden]

On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 21:38 +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 08:30:40PM +0800, James L. Clarke wrote:

<snip>

> 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.


For an interesting perspective on the Ubuntu/ Debian binary
compatibility question from The Shuttleworth FAQ , see:

http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=657

quote:

In short, because we believe in Free Software as a collaborative process
focused on SOURCE CODE, and consider it superior to the proprietary
process which is focused on specific applications and binary bits. We
choose to devote the large majority of our energy to the improvement of
the source code that is widely and freely available, rather than trying
to work on binary bits that cannot be shared as widely.


Tim Bowden