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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.'"
CDE will always mean Common Desktop Environment to me.
I think most people here are not understanding the target audience for this tool (hint: it's not for your typical linux environment). It's not about package management or having a universal installer... it's about being able to run your application in a different environment where you don't have admin rights.
In a lot of university clusters or compute grids researchers have access to a large collection of compute nodes, but they usually don't have any rights to those machines. In fact, most of the time the programs are ran in a sandbox and have a restrictive environment. To run their codes reliably, researchers often have to perform some sort of static linking or package up all of the dependencies with the executable. apt-get or yum are not options in these environments... you may not even be able to ssh into them. Ideally, you could ask the system administrator that controls the cluster to install certain packages, but again, this is not always possible particularly if the researcher requires a niche package used in their domain.
Moreover, the cluster may be composed of heterogenous set of machines with different versions of Linux. Package management does not help you here. The only way to reliably execute your programs on such a heterogenous cluster is to statically link or include your dependencies. If you are wondering who would use such a maddening environment where you have no admin rights... google Condor, OpenScienceGrid and Globus. This is how a lot of research computation is done.
Of course, the hot new thing is virtual machines and clouds... but firing up a VM each time you want to run an application is very heavyweight... especially if your applications has a short run-time.
TL;DR: this isn't for your typical ubuntu or fedora install; it's for scientific research that is done on restrictive computing clusters and grids.
As a side note, I made and use a much cruder tool http://bitbucket.org/pbui/starch/ that packages everything up (executables, libraries, and data) in a self-extracting tarball which can be executed on remote hosts. It's not as slick as CDE, but it's been used with success by various research groups that I collaborate with.
You're not even replying to anything I said, except to post an ill-informed rant.
There are *three* package types. And what these do is far more than anything seen in the Windows universe.
Windows doesn't even *have* a packaging scheme. Sure, there are installers, but that's all they do. There is no dependency resolution. There isn't any updating except manually or if the individual program checks by itself. Things really haven't come very far from the self-extracting .zip file method of installing. What we've gotten over the years is a graphical front-end to an archive extraction and a script to tweak the registry, and a script to uninstall. That's it. It's arcane. It's stone knives and bear skins.
At least Microsoft dispensed with the bogus "add and remove software" and renamed it "remove software" in the Control Panel. In XP if you came from Debian, you'd expect the "add and remove software" would be where you'd find the Windows equivalent of Synaptic. Sorry, chuckles, it's not. Now in Windows 7 it's finally fixed. It's a small amount of honesty, but it's still better than before.
And besides, do you know how long it takes to make a package for Linux after compiling? Literally less than 5 minutes, and it can be automated. Doing packaging for 3 package formats (.deb, .rpm, tar.gz) is not a lot of work at all.
What is available for software take packaging and distribution for Linux software is light years ahead of anything seen in the Windows universe. The Apple "app store" is the only thing that comes close and even that is clunky compared to a fully functioning Debian or RPM repository.
Your rant is typical of the Windows user who thinks he knows anything about Linux but doesn't really. I suggest you acquaint yourself with what you're talking about before you open your mouth here again and sound even more silly.
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BMO