Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 5th Nov 2009 23:05 UTC
As we all know, Mac OS X has support for what is called 'fat binaries'. These are binaries that can carry code for for instance multiple architectures - in the case of the Mac, PowerPC and x86. Ryan Gordon was working on an implementation of fat binaries for Linux - but due to the conduct of the Linux maintainers, Gordon has halted the effort.
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RE[3]: Comment by Zifre
by MysterMask on Sun 8th Nov 2009 17:06
in reply to "RE[2]: Comment by Zifre"
Member since:2005-07-12
Um... couldn't you do this with the shell script solution too? As long as you don't delete any binaries, it will act exactly the same as universal binaries on OSX.
The important word in your sentence is 'could'. And that's why Linux is still so far behind when it comes to desktop solutions for the masses: no user friendly interface standards (I don't talk about the size of icons but the fundamental mechanisms) and an inability to think outside the box (i. e. administrated server environment situations).
E. g. under Mac OS X, grandpa Jo can copy an app from his PPC64 machine to grandma Mary's x86 notebook simply by dragging and dropping a single file and without even thinking about different CPU architectures: grandpa Jo (rightfully!) expects this to work and it does - now, how many apps under Linux right now would support the same use case? Approximately none! Even if it works for some apps, he won't use such a feature because from his view it does not work reliable if it's not supported by all the apps.
So instead of adopting something that might ease the use of Linux, you rather depend on every single app creator to implement his or her own scripting solution (that might or might not work). And instead of making something as installing (and deleting) an app a simple drag-and-drop situation you force everybody to use the "magic" (i. e. incomprehensibly) package manager which normally scatters files around /usr and /opt subdirs and makes it impossible to handle things manually ..
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Member since:
2009-10-04
Yes, it is certainly possible and easy to make a command to remove unneeded binaries, but why would you do that when there is a much simpler solution. Power users can selectively delete binaries (e.g. delete arm and powerpc, but keep i686 and x86_64). And their could still be an easy command or menu option for those who don't know or care what architecture they have.
Um... couldn't you do this with the shell script solution too? As long as you don't delete any binaries, it will act exactly the same as universal binaries on OSX.