Why do Linux distros have different package names? | Hacker News Reader

Why do Linux distros have different package names?

gwan.ch

7 pointsFooBarWidget10 comments

With a collective market share of 1%, I find it hard to believe that the reason Linux distributions use incompatible package names is to get revenue from usage statistics.

Maybe we should use Hanlon's razor here: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

I suspect the razor needs an addition "or backwards compatibility". I suspect many of the names remain unchanged from when they were first added to each distro. There could also have been conflicts with similarly named packages at that time, so something pragmatic is chosen. 10 - 20 years later it looks like stupidity.

This is just idiotic. Different package naming conventions provide no meaningful lock-in. Certainly it does not force users to use distribution maintained repos; it tends to be trivial to set up your own mirror of official repos.

This whole web page reads like a crazy paranoid snake oil salesman SEO spam landing page. What the hell.

The rabbit-hole goes deeper... Search for gwan with hnsearch, this guy is the losethos of webservers or something.

The way he claims that PHK (of Varnish fame) has "difficulties with C and UNIX" on http://gwan.ch/blog/20120413.html (but at the same time is apparently unaware of "dpkg -L packagename" to find the files installed by a .deb in http://gwan.ch/blog/20121021.html ) is just... jawdropping

"losethos"? Are you talking about this guy? https://twitter.com/losethos

There was a long thread on Something Awful about this very, uh, "special" operating system written by one lone guy. Looks like it's renamed now: http://www.sparrowos.com/

So what is special about losethos? I see it's 64-bit multi-tasking real-mode, and I see he's apparently posted some unpopular opinions on various forums (not sure what his posts are, they've all been deleted), causing him to become banned. Doesn't seem like any big deal to me.

According to http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html the author is often ridiculed for his work. I don't think the G-WAN author is in a comparable situation.

He seems, to a layman untrained in psychology, to be very... unstable. Just for starters, he seems to think that some sort of god talks to him through some sort of "dissociated press" style markov chains, or something.

His old HN account: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos

His new account: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SparrowOS

What I mean by comparing this guy to losethos is that his paranoid rantings and delusions of grandeur (ill-considered rants like this one, or rants about conspiracies to explain why his software isn't more widely used, etc) give me serious "danger! stay away!" vibes.

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