|
From: | Przemek Klosowski |
Subject: | Re: Build a portable linux binary? |
Date: | Fri, 22 Feb 2019 11:33:38 -0500 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.2.1 |
On 2/22/19 3:10 AM, roland65 wrote:
Now, some colleagues and friends who use another Linux distro, wanted to use my work and they simply couldn't. They have to do the same work of building these many Octave packages for their particular distribution. Most of them found it was too complicated and they gave up... So, I think it would make sense to have a way to distribute a portable binary package that could be run on many Linux distributions... Anyway, thanks to all for your advices. I'll try to investigate the proposed solutions and if I obtain some interesting results, I'll let you know...
How many different Linux distributions are your friends using? From where I sit, there are two main flavors: Fedora/Redhat/Centos and Debian/Ubuntu, and they are supported by distribution-level packages.
What you are asking for, an universal package, is in line with the recent trend towards modules, containers, VMs, flatpaks, etc. The whole concept has some serious advangages and disadvangages . On the plus side, one package for all environments has merits:
- simplifies the life of Octave packagers - one update covers all environments - not held back by individual distributions' runtimes (*)The disadvantages, however, are serious because it decouples the Octave update from the distro updates
- bugs aren't fixed by automatic distro updates; you have to remember to update all your individual flatpaks/modules
- the independent package model implies baking dependencies into each package, which is bad:
- calcifies and multiplies bugs - prevents systematic fixing of issues across the entire ecosystem - is wasteful (multiple copies)- promotes version stagnation for Octave users because of no automatic updates
Time will tell which approach will win---people are trying to come up with mitigations for the disadvantages. I am skeptical, but I could see being proven wrong.
(*) THis is a serious problem that you mention: old distros sometimes prevent the use of new packages. At the same time, I am perplexed and frustrated when people insist on simultaneously using some obsolete base OS and the newest version of enduser software like Octave. Having said that, I do realize that many people have the OS imposed on them by their inflexible IT organization.
[Prev in Thread] | Current Thread | [Next in Thread] |