Mark Allums grabbed a keyboard and wrote:
>
> You have it the wrong way around. In fact, none of that is me at all. I am
> generally aware of the quoting conventions.
That is *very* weird then - because the message I was replying to at the
time was "From:" your address. Oh well, beats me. :-)
> From: David Guntner [mailto:davidg@akaMail.net]
>> I don't know what kind of time-table they have set for themselves, but
>> given Valve's increasing interest in the Linux market, I'd be willing to
>> bet that once their open beta testing period is over with, they'll start
>> expanding to other Linux distribution packaging systems, and may well
>> even provide a method for installing software without a package manager
>> (a'la tarball, etc.). I'm pretty sure it's just a matter of time. :-)
>
> Thanks for your reply. I am a bit skeptical that many distributions will be
> officially supported. Certainly Ubuntu and direct derivatives, possibly
> Debian and direct derivatives, probably Fedora and some other RPM-based
> distros such as OpenSuSE. Slackware, Arch, and Gentoo are likely out of
> luck.
Given the number of Linux distributions out there, I have *yet* to see a
company selling software that is packaged up to take advantage of every
single one - they tend to go with the ones that have the larger user
bases, such as Red Hat/Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu, etc. Even among a lot of
free software packages, what I tend to see is that they either just tar
it up and let you download that and place it where you want
(Thunderbird, for example), or do a mixed offering with a binary package
supporting .rpm & .deb and then a tarball for everything that doesn't
use those (BOINC comes to mind here as an example of that).
For whatever reason, they've gone with Ubuntu on a packaged binary for
their open beta test. Given the amount of noise that has been made by
Valve about wanting to expand into the Linux world, it makes no sense
that ultimately they wouldn't eventually provide more package types for
more distributions, including possibly a non-package (tar) that can be
installed for those OS distributions that they don't "officially"
support. So yea, I expect that at *some* point, Valve will be offering
a package for Debian and others, with possibly a tar that's not
officially supported.
To be honest, given the "800-pound gorilla in the playground" status
that Red Hat has, I'm surprised that if Valve is limiting to one
platform while beta testing that they didn't pair up with Fedora, since
that would give them a larger potential user base. :-) But that's just me.
--Dave
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