On 10/14/06, Mike Hearn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Why can some companies do this and Adobe not?
Adobe *could* do it, but they don't want to because it's extremely
unpleasant and annoying.
I don't want to do the unpleasant things in my job either but they have to be done.
How did they start on Windows and Mac?
> What do they need? An "installer api" that is used by each and every
> linux/unix distro?
Amongst other things, yes. They do exist. Autopackage is one, for
instance. There are various issues with all of these programs though
that make them hard to use. Adobe have looked at autopackage in the
past, but I believe they wanted to use the same installation system
also with other UNIXes like Solaris, and we don't support that.
> One version of one distro is equivalent with one version of Windows.
There is basically one, maybe two versions of Windows you need to
support - XP and 2000. They are very, very similar. Doing this is
really easy and you get 95% of the market. Support ABC random distro
and you get, what, a fraction of a percent? It's not worth it.
That's the problem, not technical problems but not enough market share.
Do you know why Windows and Mac are more popular than the other operating systems?
Marketing, plain and simple marketing. Not technical perfection.
If people keep saying: "yes linux isn't perfect we need to work on things", we'll still be working on things in a hundred years and get no progress. The linux community needs to be a lot more vocal.
> What I mean is, each distribution is a completely different operating
> system but built with common parts like the linux kernel. Yet,
> conveniently, some think that everything that uses the linux kernel is
> by definition the same operating system.
If it's not the same operating system then there's no point us even
being here, because nobody will EVER write software for any of them,
because there aren't enough people using one particular distro. The
only reason so many apps exist for Linux is because you can write one
once and have potentially many users (and therefore developers).
> Of course. One needs to write an install program, it's as simple as that.
I suggest you review the autopackage documentation and maybe code
before claiming it's simple ... it really isn't at all.
I don't want to claim that writing it is simple, I wanted to say that all it comes down to is writing an installer.
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