

Why do Linux distros have different package names? - FooBarWidget
http://gwan.ch/faq#packages

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CaioAlonso
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."

~~~
rogerbinns
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.

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jlgreco
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.

------
0x0
This whole web page reads like a crazy paranoid snake oil salesman SEO spam
landing page. What the hell.

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

~~~
FooBarWidget
"losethos"? Are you talking about this guy? <https://twitter.com/losethos>

~~~
0x0
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/>

~~~
FooBarWidget
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.

~~~
jlgreco
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.

