On Sun, 11 Nov 2012 12:45:56 +0100 Joseph Rushton Wakeling <joseph.wakel...@webdrake.net> wrote:
> On 11/11/2012 11:57 AM, Thomas Koch wrote: > > So by getting your package in the archives of Debian and Fedora, > > you should serve the large majority of linux users. > > Which is well and good, but doesn't address the problem that software > developers face, which is "How can I make directly available binaries > of my programs that will work for any Linux user?" > I'm not a Linux expert, but I'm fairly certain the answer is "You can't". Linux is very good at a lot of things, but standardization is definitely not one of them. Linux is just far too divergent ("herding cats" comes to mind) for a widely-compatible binary to be realistic. The best that can be done is make a dead-simple-to-use script to grab dependencies (isolated from the rest of the system if need be) and compile. > It's useful to be able to do that regardless of whether your software > is FOSS and regardless of whether or not it's in distro repositories, > because your latest release will always take time to propagate to the > distros and because not everyone is comfortable compiling from source.