CDE — Making Linux Portability Easy

ihaque writes "A Stanford researcher, Philip Guo, has developed a tool called CDE to automatically package up a Linux program and all its dependencies (including system-level libraries, fonts, etc!) so that it can be run out of the box on another Linux machine without a lot of complicated work setting up libraries and program versions or dealing with dependency version hell. He's got binaries, source code, and a screencast up. Looks to be really useful for large cluster/cloud deployments as well as program sharing. Says Guo, 'CDE is a tool that automatically packages up the Code, Data, and Environment involved in running any Linux command so that it can execute identically on another computer without any installation or configuration. The only requirement is that the other computer have the same hardware architecture (e.g., x86) and major kernel version (e.g., 2.6.X) as yours. CDE allows you to easily run programs without the dependency hell that inevitably occurs when attempting to install software or libraries. You can use CDE to allow your colleagues to reproduce and build upon your computational experiments, to quickly deploy prototype software to a compute cluster, and to submit executable bug reports.'"

Comments

Re:Use a package manager

[presidenteloco]

The real problem is that Linux distributions, taken together or individually, presents developers with too many completely unnecessary choices as to where essential library files can be put, and also, there is no standard version naming and locating convention.

Package managers are a complex solution to a problem that need not have existed in the first place, if it was realized that unnecessary choice is deadly dangerous, in the world of large-scale software interoperability.

There does not need to be any choice for where on a file system a given application or a given library should be located. That should be completely determined by the app or library name, version (using a standard versioning scheme), variant (using a standard variant naming scheme), and origin person-or-organization, using a standard organization identifying scheme.

It goes without saying that there should also be a standard globally unique URI for such libraries and apps (including the unique name, version, variant, origin identification).

So there should be no choice about where on the internet to get it (except for the choice involved in a standard mirroring URI scheme), and
no choice about where to put it.

With this discipline, obviously needed in today's universe of code, all such package management, as well as dependency acquisition and installation, could be managed by a single unified and incredibly simple automated package manager; call it the TPM (trivial package manager).

I predict that's the direction things will move. It's the direction they should move.
All programmers repeat after me:
-Unnecessary choice is (the root of all ;) evil
-The default shall be good

Yes. It's a religion. But it's good for you. Now eat your vegetables.