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Compatibility Issues Across Linux Distributions?
CarrotLord asks: "Looking at the recent release of IBM's Small Business Suite for Linux got me wondering about distribution compatibility and standards. Personally, I run
Debian, and am considering a move to
Progeny. However, I am concerned by the fact that many products (particularly commercial ones) are available for only a particular subset of distributions (usually RedHat,
Mandrake,
SuSE,
TurboLinux and
Caldera, but rarely
Debian-based distributions or the BSDs). What is the current state of play, particularly in regards to tools for developers to enable them to create and test installation packages for various distributions?" Such a tool would go a long way in removing the force behind the "Linux fragmentation" argument that most of Linux's detractors often refer to.
"How are the LSB and the FSSTND affecting consistency between distros? What about RPM and APT? What tools are there available for developers of software to ensure that their software runs on the widest variety of systems? Is there some software development or packaging tool to assist developers in making distribution-independant software, so they can create files in dpkg, RPM and tgz formats for any distribution without much additional effort on their part? What about tools to test their software installation on individual distributions, and assist with the resolution of problems? Should this be up to the individual distributions, or should be have a unified approach?"
I prefer to grab the .tar.gz or bz2 of the source and compile it myself. No incompatibilities yet. :-)
So long as I know whbat the package requirements are I have had no trouble installing quite a few RedHat (ick) .RPMs. Even Win4Lin went in without a hitch. It's just a matter of reading the documentation. Needs PAM, glibc2.2, bash2.17. no problem. Sometimes there's some path altering and whatnot but it's generally not a problem.
Writing installers for multiple distributions is relatively easy. The killer for a commercial software product is testing. Proper testing takes a great deal of time and money. There is a big difference between "it should run" on distribution X and "tested and supported" on distribution X.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Agreed.
Let's not forget, administrators don't necessarily want to go through that much of a pain in the ass to get a package installed.
As this stuff comes out, we're finding more flaws in the Linux/distro models. Things that need to be fixed at some point to be a great enterprise scale operating system. These are things that code itself won't fix, it's management.
Not to mean that Linux is, by nature, flawed. Far from it. But every system goes through this kind of thing.
This is not a troll! .deb file once.
But, it seems to me as if the companys are trying to pick a standard. Redhat was one of the first Linux distros to come out, and alot of other Distros are based on it, or are atleast using RPMs. And, most likely, there are more people using it. Out of all the stuff I have ever downloaded for Linux, I have only seen a selection for a