Neal Gompa (ngomp...@gmail.com) said: > And frankly, if you're trying to solve delivering software in a > cross-distro fashion, you're doing it wrong. Take for example how RPMs > "work": packages are generated with a set of generic dependencies > based on the symbols of libraries and programs. There is literally no > reason why I couldn't make a package on CentOS 7 and expect it to work > on virtually every Linux distribution release from around that time. > > To the best of my knowledge, the only significant breakage is with > OpenSSL, where Fedora refused to set the same soversion that Debian, > Mageia, Ubuntu, and other distros chose (1.0.0). This symbol break has > led to it becoming impossible to ship something built on Fedora to > work on a wide variety of distributions. > > Much of the way RPM is designed is to *promote* cross-distro (and to > some extent, cross-OS) packages. The fact that we don't is more of an > artifact of the past than anything else. It continues to amaze me that > we've given up on promoting our core technology in such a manner. In > many, many, many ways, it is technically superior (in terms of > flexibility and fitness for purpose) to the other alternatives out > there, but everyone seems to have given up.
I would argue that the fact that very very very few upstreams even try to do this puts the lie to the idea that RPM is a sufficient technology for this. Heck, Fedora doesn't even try to do this across Fedora versions in general (MASS REBUILD THE WORLD!), and we control all of it. Even those that do try for 'single' RPM builds accomplish this by a) bundling the world outside of some really minimal LSB libs (for which distros will yell at you... see this thread) b) adding giant hacked shell scripts that includes a bunch of if statements for distro-specific code (for which distros will yell at you... see this thread) Bill -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
