Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

keyle

> supports one of the following operating systems

Redhat and Ubuntu.

Is that a common thing for software to be marked as "available for Linux" but only supported for 2 flavours?

I guess it's fair, a debian and rhel base would cover "most" use cases.

View on HN

In the enterprise software world: yes. Remember, this is not open source. They probably only test on those two platforms, and compile against the libraries for them. Could you make it work on other distributions? Sure. Certainly in a docker container or chroot.

You can make it a static binary and thus make it portable on all distributions that have a minimum specified kernel version. Or you can use formats like AppImage that are designed to encapsulate a program into an image that can be run as a normal executable, without depending on the distribution but again only on the kernel.

It may be possible, but enterprise type companies like supporting a limited number of differences. It limits the risk of having to diagnose issues that are due to some sort of weird compile option for the kernel or someone using musl instead of glibc.

> Is that a common thing for software to be marked as "available for Linux" but only supported for 2 flavours?

Yes, because it keeps the support matrix smaller. As much as people like to think “Linux is Linux is Linux”, there’s all sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle system and library-level differences between distributions that can cause software to not work properly. IBM can’t and won’t test against every single distribution nor will they support their software running on whatever obscure distribution someone decides to use.

Yes, there is an expectation that if there's an OS issue there's an enterprise support organization the application developer can work with.

I'm actually surprised to see Ubuntu. It's typically just RHEL and SLES with Oracle Linux occasionally thrown in.

> Is that a common thing for software to be marked as "available for Linux" but only supported for 2 flavours?

Very common. For example Steam for Linux only really supports Ubuntu.

In my experience, extracting stuff from debs and rpms to run on, say, Arch Linux was very easy, using debtap, rpmextract, etc.

Too often "supports linux" means "supports Ubuntu, might work on other debian based distros". But I can't blame people for not wanting to support every distro under the moon

The key word here is "support". Will it run? Probably. Is some IBM support engineer going to help you if you tried it on some other distro? No.

Generally yes and that is an enormous step.

If IBM had a clue the first flavor on their list would be Amazon Linux.

(yes, I know it's a RHEL derivative, but I also know some large fraction of 'developers' are oblivious to these matters, which is why no one hesitated to list 'CentOS' when that still made sense.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com