

Linux Foundation launches killer development tool - luckystrike
http://www.linux.com/feature/144170

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mark-t
"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.

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gaius
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.

~~~
SwellJoe
_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.

------
swombat
Linux.com launches killer exaggeration article.

~~~
unalone
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.

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

I'm everywhere!

BOOOOO!

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

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

