Re: [Evolution] downloads page

[Tom Davies <tomdavies04 yahoo co uk>]

Hi :)
Ahah, i was wondering if that was right.  I've noticed a few times that distros change pathnames in order to be more consistent with each other and wondered how much that mattered. 

The User Profiles for many of the links i gave used to be,
/home/<user name>/

but most seem to have moved to 

/home/<user name>/.config

to join others that had already made the move.  There still seem to be a few things elsewhere but no huge surprises.  It seems that people try to make the migration as obvious as they can.  So all versions of LibreOffice 3.x.x use the old path and all versions of 4.x.x use the new one.  However i can easily imagine tracking that sort of thing for thousands of packages is a bit of a nightmare. 

Someone mentioned a couple of distros that split up certain things that other distros keep together and i can easily imagine there is always at least 1 package or 1 distro that has to be different.  However if the vast majority do conform then wouldn't it be fairly easy make compiled versions just for them and then worry about the oddities 'later'? 

Regards from

Tom :) 

---

From: Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>
To: "evolution-list gnome org" <evolution-list gnome org>
Sent: Tuesday, 27 August 2013, 17:21
Subject: Re: [Evolution] downloads page

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

_______________________________________________
evolution-list mailing list
evolution-list gnome org
To change your list options or unsubscribe, visit ...
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list