What's a developer to do?

[Jason Stephenson]

Uh, he could release the source and let people build it themselves. That 
is honestly the only way to guarantee the code runs on your machine, to 
compile it yourself.

Frankly, I think that is what the different distros are for, providing 
binary packages that work with their mix of software and libs. They 
*should* be doing the work of distributing the binaries.

I must say, though, that I've never really had an issue with getting 
binaries to run on GNU/Linux or FreeBSD. I've always been able to 
resolve the depency issues by reading the errors when a dynamically 
linked application fails to link. The most trouble that I recall having 
was with getting Java to run on a Slackware box, and that was a simple 
matter of soft linking a couple of binaries from where Slackware puts 
'em to where Red Hat would put them, and then running ld on a couple of 
the Java binaries so that the link info would get updated.

Anyway, I know this isn't helpful but I'm starting to agree more and 
more with RMS (and probably Maddog, too) the more that I deal with 
binary only "software." I've recently adopted the motto that it isn't 
software without source code, so I have little sympathy for the 
difficulties that developers face getting their binary-only software to 
work on different platforms.

Sorry for the polemic. I'll step down off of the soapbox, now.

I'd suggest to your developer that he actually consider running ld as 
part of the post-install. That just might fix a lot of the problems.

Cheers,
Jason