[DEBIAN] Standardization?
I just has a discussion on a mailing list for another distribution and a
point was raised that I think deserves some discussion here. The main
focus was on linux applications and difficulties in supporting the
different distributions and versions as linux is such a quickly moving
target.
One of the points raised was that even though there is a filesystem
standard, there is still too much leeway in that some things like system
initialization files and how they are arrainged can differ widely from one
distribution to the next. It was noted that debian does its /etc/rc.*
completely different than RedHat does as an example.
Is there any REALLY GOOD reason for stuff like this? I know that the next
distribution is likely to cause a lot of turmoil with the libc6 thing and
a lot of work needs to go into recompliling the world but how about if we
have a look at this in some future release.
Maybe we should sit down, take a hard look at some of the other popular
distributions (Slackware, RedHat, Caldera), look at how they have some
common things set up and see if some proposals can be created to take the
best concepts from the distributions and try to come up with a more
unified approach to basic system layout issues.
I use the rc.* stuff as a basic example because if an application needs to
update an init script or create one, you basicly need completely different
code for each installation script.
Linux International should probably be in on this as well. Unless there
is some compelling technical reason to do something a particular way
(other than that was simply how the distribution evolved and changing it
will break all the contrib packages) then a standard method should be
adopted. I am not talking about a merger in packaging formats (though
that WOULD be nice) but a look at how the different distributions vary in
their construction, figure out if there is any good REASON for it, and
decide on a standard.
Until the different distributions come closer together in this regard, I
fear that you will see commercial applications coming only for commercial
distributions that can pay developers to create the stuff based on their
format. This may cause other distributions with wither on the vine over
time as good applications became easy to find for the other distributions.
Chances of getting the source for a commercial app and being able to
custom build it for another distribution would be pretty slim.
George Bonser
Segmentation Fault just kidding :)
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