Debian flamewar (plus a "GNU/Linux" rant)

Benjamin Scott bscott at ntisys.com
Tue Feb 15 01:51:01 EST 2005


On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, at 6:43pm, pri.lugofnh at iadonisi.to wrote:
>   Wait, I'm have a little trouble understanding the problem.

  I know you know this, but it's educational to state it explicitly:

  The problem is simply that binary compatibility is hard.

  Easy enough; it's the implications that are subtle.  Like that building a
key system library with different options makes it a different package.  
That changing a key system library thus changes the entire configuration
management scenario.  That a package that has different subcomponents, each
with their own dependencies, is a package that depends on all of them.  
That auto-built dependencies tend to be even pickier then the real ones.  
That packages are only as good as their (builder supplied) metadata.  And so 
on and so forth.

  There must be something about this that is either hard to comprehend, or
hard to accept.  It gives a lot of RPM users trouble, it gives Debian users
a sense of superiority, it's what makes BSD ports work so well, and it's
largely responsible for making Microsoft Windows the unholy mess that it is.  
Clearly, there's a disconnect here.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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