Re: [Evolution] downloads page

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Tue, 2013-08-27 at 16:35 +0100, Tom Davies wrote:
> Hi :)  
> I thought that was one of the myths about Gnu&Linux.  
>
> Several times i have seen people saying that packages in Gnu&Linux
> need a separate new compile for each individual distro.  However all
> the links i gave to other projects show only 2-3 downloads and that
> seems to be enough to cover almost all versions of almost all
> distros.  

There are soft lines and hard lines in package deployment.  When a
distribution makes a major change, like version of GCC, or glibc, or a
common dependency changes - a package may need to be recompiled.  But
generally the dynamic linker allows a binary to run across a swath of
minor versions [of a dependency].

Path and naming conventions are generally the reason you need a
distribution specific package - and that is no small thing.  It can
control if an install applications shows up on a menu, etc... which is a
real usability issue - and something self-hosted one-off download
binaries almost always lack.

> I hadn't realised that Evo is slightly different and more tightly
> integrated with just 1 version of just 1 DE.  So although it's not
> quite possible with Evo it does seem to be fine with the others.  

It works very well in a FreeDesktop environment [KDE or GNOME or like].
It will not work so well elsewhere;  it uses D-Bus services and other DE
services to provide the awesome sauce [which other like applications
cannot].

> So for a Gnu&Linux app to hit the vast majority of users it just needs
> to be compiled about 3 times. 

Or far more often; it depends.  But build services exist to do this.  I
can publish a package on OBS [openSUSE build service] and get packages
for openSUSE, Ubuntu, CentOS, etc...  Much of this is automated away
[for someone who chooses to use the tools, if they don't, oh well].



-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <mailto:awilliam whitemice org> GPG D95ED383
Systems Administrator, Python Developer, LPI / NCLA