For independent software vendors, one of the major problems in supporting GNU/Linux is the variety of package management systems. However, if the Free Standards Group has its way, the next version of the Linux Standard Base will solve that problem by providing an application programming interface that acts as a bridge between the major package systems and software installers. Ian Murdock, CTO of the Free Standards Group, says the solution could be included in the most widely used distributions by early 2008.
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Member since:2006-03-03
Not when you are trying just to get $h|t done! There are times when I get ticked because say I run into a nasty bug in a analyzer while doing a network trace to find a fault in driver code. We can't afford to fiddle-f*ck around (non-productive work) for hours wasting time because current installers don't have the latest version (which contains the fix) in its repo. Here is when we need the app updated fast so we can get back to debugging code (productive work).
This is why companies don't like to support in house Linux development. Far too often simple obstacles like upgrading an analyzer can take forever when it should only take a couple of minutes. Boss comes over to see how that 30 minute bug fix is coming along but you are off spanking your johnson trying to get the analyzer updated just so you can get started.
The nightmare of installing updated software when binaries are not supplied by the distribution truly sucks! And really it sucks even if they do when it is a non-trivial app. I do like installers such as APT as it does ease the pain of fetching dependencies but it only works IF the planets are aligned just right in the repository ... this sucks!
Have you ever downloaded KDE in hopes to update to its latest version and tried to build from source? No? How about installing a new Subversion when you have KDevelop on your machine? No? Give it a whirl sometime, as you'll especially enjoy the apr0 vs apr1 library nightmare.
At the very least I would like to see it solve the dependency hell for user apps but the utimate end game for the new package manager interface needs to allow the UPDATE of any existing installed package with the ease of a click (or enter for you old-schoolers).
If the distribution doesn't provide you with a binary but the project site does .. no sweat! Just enter the URL of the project's download site and move on.
Member since:
2005-11-15
LSB already allows app vendors to package their apps in universally-compatible RPMs. This new API will allow app vendors to ship binary-only installers that do who-knows-what to your system, like in Windows. I simply don't see how this is an improvement for users or developers. Murdock claims that it is easier for vendors to write installers than to create RPMs, but I don't understand how this can be true.