Linked by Andrew Davis on Mon 22nd Nov 2004 20:12 UTC
I admit that I'm a geek. I use Linux. I use Solaris. I use FreeBSD. At times, I use Windows. And without a doubt, I download and try almost every Linux distribution when they come out. Over the last few years, I've tried all of the RedHat/Fedora releases, 2 different Lindows/Linspire releases, Mandrake, Gentoo, Xandros, Suse, Ubuntu, and the list goes on.
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>All well and good, but is this technically possible anyway? >As he says himself, there is such a thing as dependency >hell, so how on earth would Linspire be able to install >their software properly on, say, Fedora or Debian, >shortcuts and all?
Re-build the packages for each system you want to support and make sure it works on that system. Click n run will handle the dependencies for you just as apt or yum or yast does.
By the way, dependency hell need not exist on any of the major distros such as suse, rehat, mandrake, (your favorite distro). They all come with a front end for package management which handles the dependencies for you. If I download software built for suse 9.1, I can click on it and it will automatically display information on the package and give me an option to install it. It will be installed with yast, and as long as the package was built with the library versions which are included with the distro, it will be installed without a problem. If you are missing some dependencies, yast will figure it out and fetch and install them as well.
So the main requirement for distributing software for a distro is to make sure it works with that distro and the
libraries that are included in the distro, not with some upgraded versions of the same libraries. That's not too much to ask for.