You have always been super bright and this article will help a lot of people in the industry…. I loved the complaints from the Windows-hugger.

Keep building. You have a great support system.

Signed: Your grandfather.

You are confusing two separate problems that aren’t as tightly related as you seem to think:

1. The variety of different Linux distributions creates extra work for third-party developers that wish to package their software for easy installation.
2. How to resolve dependency issues with third-party packages.

Taking the second problem first…even if there was only one Linux distribution in the world, the use of central repositories for distributing software can still be a good idea because tools like apt and yum can make sure all necessary dependencies are resolved without requiring the end-user to track down every prerequisite package needed to install some other package.

As for the first problem, I would humbly suggest that if you have THAT big of a problem with the fact that freedom of choice causes people to make different choices that you find to be absurdly picayune, Linux probably isn’t the platform for you. If the lack of point and click installers bothers you that much, you should probably stick with a proprietary computing platform.

and I guess that “one” would be a distro controlled by your friends at Microsoft … yes the one that lusts for the day when it can establish a taxation office at every turn of the global computing cycle.

No thanks.

If there was only one Linux distro (say Fedora for sake of argument), then any software author could create a Fedora RPM, publish it on their web site, and one could download and install from there, rather than the great big centralised Fedora repository. The only reason this does not happen is becuase there is not one Linux distro, but thousands.

True some authors publish a couple of binary packages for a subset of the major distros, but its a forgone conclusion that the distro im currently using is’nt one of them.

The proliferation of the Linux distros is just plain absurd. They are all just different enough to be incompatible, but similar enough that there is no justification whatever for there existence. Is having a different wallpaper or a new font really a good reason to create a whole new Linux distro and repackage the 10 thousand apps that go with it?

Some people say its about having choice. Mac OS-X, Windows, Linux - thats choice - they are different. Linux-1, Linux-2, Linux-3, …… Linux-10001 is not choice. They are all the same near enough. Its just a great example of what happens to software when the authors make the software to please themselves, rather than for the end users benefit.

The free software / open source communities, hackers and IT enthusiasts might like the current situation, but I doubt if people who really use the system do (how many of them are there i wonder).

Sally is not a typical end user. Typical end users dont compile programs or build packages. They use programs, they don’t write them or modify them.

As to me having a solution for the installation problems, I do. Scrap every version of Linux except one. End of install problems. QED.

On Microsoft platforms, 3rd parties are second class citizens. They will never integrate as well as MS products can nor get the most efficient APIs to use to hook up with the core system or other MS apps.

Linux is open, allowing everyone to integrate tightly. The choice is that the tighter the integration, the more work it takes maintaining that software as the system evolves. At least you have that tradeoff option (vs Windows) if you are a 3rd party developer (in a sense, everyone on FOSS is a 3rd party developer). And if you go open source, the community will help out.

Microsoft’s public API will by necessity have to limit the amount of system integration. [And this assuming Microsoft was a kind-hearted nonprofit that didn’t go further, and that they announced all changes as their internal devs made the changes.. but then they’d just about be FOSS which we know they aren’t.] This is a major reason 3rd parties continue to fall to Microsoft on Windows (naturally, some vendors have or have had special deals with Microsoft).

I won’t disagree with your goal to simplify things for the end user. I am just not convinced yet that packaging as it is done isn’t beneficial in more ways than not.

A main issue is that packaging is a way of keeping things tidy and of modest size (vs. bloated) in a way where things have been tested to work together.

Linux advances in simplicity, but we just might not be ready to take the next step yet whatever that is.

Notice that packaging is what allows a single vendor to provide some sort of guarantee over all the software on the system. Packaging also has its roots where one small group or person manages the software for many others (enterprise, etc). Things are more controlled.

Anyway, there is nothing stopping people from building one-click install packages that stay in their own little world (they do) and users from installing them to their hearts content (some do). You take that route when you want bleeding edge or if you are using a distro that is less well supported than fedora; however, naturally, it will not integrate as well with what you have as you might like.

Benefits of having this sort of integrated testing modern distro-based packaging provides is that you can upgrade your entire system quickly and easily and not have to deal with having all sorts of things break (when they break it’s a bug and usually gets fixed quickly).

Look at Microsoft, they do this same sort of things but only with their own products (and they likely comingle code much more). They have limited resources which is why you end up with fewer pieces of software when you go Microsoft only.

We do a similar form of integration where various packages coordinate, but this means that prior to the coordination people would step on each other’s toes to some extent.

Another alternative would be to just make packages that are very inflexible, but with so many people working on things, this would create too many incompatibility headaches without recourse (except to hack the code) and provide no smooth migration from the past.

Finally, LSB, freedesktop, and other standards help speed up the process and increase the likelihood that one-click installs will work fine (if perhaps bring unneeded bloat), but again, almost by definition bleeding edge means that it is going beyond what has been standardized.

For the time being, if you have software you want to distribute, you can do one-click sealed deals thing or tarball thing and let the community do the packaging for their favorite distros to provide the eventual tighter integration there.

Finally, feel free to state your detailed argument as to how your system beats the pants off everyone and find a few other enlightened souls to help you bring that system to life. Good luck.

Why didn’t you choose Harry? Too cheesy?