Arthur Pemberton wrote:
Just out of curiosity, how feasible do you think it might
be to give up on the overwhelmingly complex task of
making all 3rd party software installation compatible,
and instead make linux userland be able to install
multiple incompatible packages (heck, be able to install
both rpms and debs for that matter) in multiple "virtual
roots"?
Why not just give up on any Linux install being compatible with any
other and compile everything statically instead - like the commercial
apps are forced to do since they can't count on anything in common among
distributions?
Kinda like Google Earth and Skype?
Kinda like _every_ linux app where it isn't recompiled for the library
version de jour and this month's file system committee shuffle for every
distro/version. So far most of the discussion of problems here has just
been about one version of one distro that can't even stay compatible
with itself. Try to imagine building something that you expect to run
for years across different distros/versions. And this is an OS where
most of the application level API was specified 25+ years ago.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
