What's a developer to do?

Bruce Dawson jbd at codemeta.com
Thu Apr 20 09:03:01 EDT 2006


I ran across this on the Starkit mailing list... (Starkits are a way of
packaging TCL modules so they are portable across architectures and OS.)

The author laments:

"I'm starting to lose the battle with Linux - the dynamic builds will
not work on all Linux systems, and the static builds are doing such
nasty things in libc nowadays that they too probably won't work  without
specific libc.so's on your system.  Apparently the world is  moving
towards a state where only Linux distro builders can produce  proper
binaries, and where a binary no longer works across Linux  releases, let
alone on another distro (what a total cop-out compared  to Windows!). "

I thought this battle was fought (and won by at least VMS) back in the
80's. What happened? Is no one fighting the upgradability challange
anymore? Isn't Perl, Java, Python, ... having similar issues? Are
individual corporate interests winning out over general user/developer
interests? Don't Linus and RMS care anymore? Is LSB dead (again)?

--Bruce



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