Linux Foundation launches killer development tool | Hacker News Reader

Linux Foundation launches killer development tool

linux.com

7 pointsluckystrike10 comments

"Ask any independent software vendor what he hates most about developing for Linux and he'll tell you that it's having to develop for SUSE and for Red Hat and for Ubuntu and ... you get the idea."

Nope. He lost me right off the bat. Maybe I just don't use strange libraries, but getting things working across the Linuxes has never been a major problem for me, apart from debian/ubuntu's broken menu system, and this app sure won't fix that. And it's certainly not the available libraries that cause problems. The things that bite me are the wider unixes: Sparcs have numlock as mod3 instead of mod2, BSDs don't use GNU make by default, Apples have one mouse button, cygwin can't store much on the stack, etc. And honestly, compatibility issues are maybe 1% of the bugs I fix. This is no silver bullet.

But if I had to say something about the disparity of Linuxes, it would be all the different compiler versions and flags that people use.

I am not sure I see the point of this. Either a distro is LSB or it isn't. This won't tell you anything you don't already know. And it exists to address a problem that only exists on Linux in the first place; none of the other major Unixes (OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, OSX etc) even have a need for something like this.

none of the other major Unixes (OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, OSX etc) even have a need for something like this

Those systems are less compatible with all of the Linux distributions. If you're building applications for a customer base that is almost entirely Linux, then those other possibilities are even more difficult to support (and justify supporting) than yet another Linux distro.

And, of course, you're also wrong: To compare apples to apples, OSX, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are about as different as Red Hat, Debian, and SuSE from one another. All come from the same core codebase, if you go back far enough in history (OSX being the odd man out, being willfully stupid on some counts for legacy reasons, I guess...maybe comparable to SlackWare, since OSX has even less useful package management tools than FreeBSD) and yet you can't generally run software compiled for one on the other unmodified. Rebuilding is usually trivial, but it pretty much always has to be done.

The thing you don't seem to get is that each Linux distribution is a different operating system, built by different teams for different purposes. Just like OSX and FreeBSD are different operating systems. Incompatibility goes without saying...it's just that Linux folks have looked at the fragmented market, and decided that it'd probably be better if software makers could build a "Linux" package and expect it to work on all "Linux" systems. That's pretty cool, though it's a rather formidable task and takes more cooperation than operating system vendors (UNIX or otherwise) have ever really been able to pull off.

Don't worry, OpenSolaris is busy fragmenting into multiple distros. :-(

Isn't the LSB just a bunch of relatively abstract guidelines about where a distro should elect to put particular files? In that case it's more like "either a distro has a particular permutation of file locations out of the hundreds permitted by the LSB or it isn't" and this new tool helps you cope with all the various LSB implementations.

Linux.com launches killer exaggeration article.

Yeah. That's something that I hate about Linux and Firefox: their news teams are wholly unprofessional. When I see a news story that's 9/10ths propaganda, I don't have much faith in the product, even when it looks nifty.

EDIT: Weird, swombat. I was just reading your whole discussion with Paul Graham in another thread. Fancy seeing you here.

EDIT 2: The opposite side of this coin is something that I love about Apple's advertising. It has a lot of glib phrases on their web pages, but after that, the entire advertising is just explaining how their stuff works.

EDIT: Weird, swombat. I was just reading your whole discussion with Paul Graham in another thread. Fancy seeing you here.

I'm everywhere!

BOOOOO!

Seems to me this will generate a few false positives, though it will be fairly good at avoiding false negatives.

Apparently, "Linux Foundation releases a compatibility tool" was too subtle.

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