[Gambas-user] C Code character manipulation - alternatives

[Benoît Minisini]

>
> In some message some day ago, KhurramM proposed a single package of
> gambas for linux, and someone else replied that a source distribution is
> the more practical one. It is true - sadly. I think this situation is
> bad - remember, Unix means "unique, one for all". As long as the
> architecture does not change, it would be very practical to have binary
> packages for all the distributions - instead, linux on PC is a mess. I
> used to compile my kernel every time, on every new machine. Then, I
> discovered that there was nothing to gain for my average desktop machine
> - it was exactly the same to compile my customized kernel or to use the
> full bloated one which came with the distibution. If it works for the
> kernel, it could work any other application. But every distribution
> creator think he is doing better than the other, and the more it does
> different, better it is. Simply wrong. The author of the message than
> spoke about windows '98, XP, 2000. Well, they are different operating
> system. But 99% of applications developed by me with delphi run smoothly
> on every windows machine I tried; the remaining 1% were secondary quirks
> easily solved. I think this is the target of Unix/Linux world. This is
> freedom, without having to mess around with makefiles and configure
> scripts that get bigger than the original source itself. I suspect that
> Benoit spends a lot of time to adapt the sources to all the different
> distributions, which all share the same kernel, same libraries, and all
> have a packaging system that keeps track of dependencies...
>
> Best regards,

Nowadays, distributions mainly differ by their packaging system, the way they 
run services only. The file system organization and many other things that 
were different in the past seem to converge.

I had a bug once in SuSE that I solved by implementing the shared library 
preloading feature, but I guess that this feature is not needed anymore.

As for the way program are packaged, you have to let a distribution manage the 
packages, because:

- They sign them: nobody can easily insert some trojan inside without notice.

- They update them.

- They manage dependencies. If a security hole is found in a library, all 
programs using that library will be fixed.

On the contrary, for me, Windows is a nightmare: each program must take care 
of being updated itself, by going to the network, checking that an update is 
available, downloading it, and so on. What about all the programs installed by 
your OEM? Do they have holes? Are they updated? And when you have to reinstall 
your Windows?

On Linux everything is centralized and you can manage your system in a few 
clicks.

On the contrary, the work is more difficult for the packager. I tried in the 
Gambas IDE to make a packager easy to use, and it was not easy to do! I had to 
deal with the difference between rpm, deb, tgz, and the little details between 
distributions using the same package format.

Having a common package format need to know all the differences in the 
organization of all distributions. You cannot force that, because you will 
destroy the diversity. Just wait, things are slowly converging.

As for the GNU autoconf/automake system, I admit it was a nightmare for me 
too. I think now that all distributions have the concept of "development 
packages", a configure script should be able to tell the system the libraries 
it needs, and the system should install them automagically. That's all. No 
thousands of long tests to run before starting compiling.

Regards,

-- 
Benoît