On 04/21/2006 04:18 PM, Jim Lux wrote: > Many times, developers choose the distro based on their personal > preferences: they have other stuff that runs on it, they're familiar with > it, they know how to build packages or rpms for it, it happened to be the > first distro they ever installed...
(My first distro was RedHat 4.2, I am now using Fedora Core 5, ... ) Well, I think the majority of developers try to make their software compilable on as wide variety of distros as possible. I am not sure a specific distro is actually needed, as far as the dttsp code is concerned. The code will probably compile on whatever distro you chose. If you look at the software available for Linux, it is not distro-specific, you find the same programs on all distros. What may differ is where certain libraries, etc, are place in the file system, creating some hassle at compile time. One way to deal with this is using autotools. If you look at source code for the majority of Linux projects you will see parts of autotools, you will notice shell-scripts such as autogen.sh, bootstrap, configure, etc. Autotools is a tool-set to find out the capabilities etc of the system you are compiling at, using this information it creates configure, Makefiles etc that are tailored to the your system/distro, i.e. it makes your software more portable. I also think the current dttsp code have been compiled on several different distros, showing that the code itself is more or less not dependent on the distro. As I run Fedora myself and I will try to make an rpm when the new code appears, and if needed put it under autotools (mainly to learn more about autotools, as I have not dealt with it that much myself before, but also as it makes it a bit easier to write a spec-file for the rpm.) I will post the result to the dttsp-linux-list when ready. Others, using other distros will probably do the same thing, creating a number of different ready to use packages for different distros. Just as is happening with other projects in the Linux world. The beauty of open software :-) On the other hand. If we look at a beginner that never have used Linux before but wants to use Linux to control their SDR-transceiver, then it may be a good thing to chose one distro as a newcomer to Linux, especially one coming from the Windows-world, will have a lot of questions. Things work and behaves differently between Windows and Linux, and if we chose one distro it will be easier to guide these newcomers in the right direction, and it will be easier for them to learn from each other, we oldies will probably stick to what we are used to :-) The chosen distribution seem to be Ubuntu, I have myself only recently tried it for a project at work, but it seem to be decent distro. Will probably be a good choice. I.e. I think we should try to make the code itself as distro-unspecific as possible, and apparently the new code even compiles on BSD and OSX, so there should not be that much hassle to make it compile on different Linux distros. > to be running Linux on their desktop. To that end, I think it is > worthwhile to consider developing the Linux stuff (at least the release > versions) for some fairly mainstream distro (RH, Mandrake, Debian, Fedora, > etc.). I will try to make a spec-file and rpm for Fedora, probably usable on the other rpm-specific distros. Mainly for my own use, but I imagine that others could be interested in it also. 73 de Lars, sm6rpz -- Lars E. Pettersson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.sm6rpz.se/
