Re: Mac OS X and Linux

From: Grant Edwards (grante_at_visi.com)
Date: 07/20/04 

Date: 20 Jul 2004 20:28:49 GMT

On 2004-07-20, Robert Heller <heller@deepsoft.com> wrote:

> GE> Assuming you have to release updates to a Windows or MacOS app
> GE> once every year or so, you would have to release Linux updates
> GE> at least once a month to keep up with constantly changing
> GE> kernels and distributions [mainly the latter unless you're
> GE> writing device drivers as part of the deal]. Even then, if you
> GE> try to support more than one or two distributions you'll drown
> GE> in support expenses.
>
> The usual 'cure' is to statically link everything. It turns
> out to be not so bad (at the cost of disk usage and
> application size).

That seems to be the only practical solution. CPU, memory and
disk are so cheap these days it's not the handicap it used to
be.

> Several commerical vendors seem to manage: RSI (IDL/ENVI),
> Matlab, and a some others.

Netscape and Adobe as well. It also seems that shipping your
own installer is the only realistic option (instead of shipping
.rpm, .deb, .whatever-the-other-distros-use).

Another option would be to release source code so that distro
installers can build/ship binaries, then just charge for
activation.

> The *only* way to keep up with kernels (drivers) is to just
> ship source code -- NVidia does this -- the installer just
> re-compiles the driver if it can't find a pre-built driver for
> the current kernel.

Nvidia's driver installer is a very cool piece of work. I wish
we had something that worked that well back when I used to work
on Linux drivers.

> Of course NVidia is making its money selling the video *cards*
> (hardware) -- NVidia's software (driver) is just 'widget
> frosting' to use Eric Raymond's terminology, so shipping the
> driver source is not a big deal, since the driver is worthless
> without the video card.

True.

> Actually, applications built under RH 6.2 generally run just
> fine under RH9 or WBL 3.0 or even FC1 (I won't comment about
> FC2). I do this all of the time. Once you get past the basic
> libc5/glibc 'hump' there is generally not too much problem.
> One can always ship 'legacy' shared libraries.

Shipping your own shared libraries (as opposed to statically
linked executables) makes quite a bit of sense if your product
consists of more than one executable. 

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Join the PLUMBER'S
                                  at               UNION!!
                               visi.com

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