few ideas how to make fedora better as a desktop

Shawn Starr sstarr at platform.com
Thu Mar 27 18:49:07 UTC 2008


> Please explain why any file has to move to keep up with Linux 
> changes. 

Nothing has to move, if we just change the system configs that set $PATH to include /sbin and /usr/sbin nothing needs to change.


> File locations themselves have always been arbitrary and 
> within a system 
> one place is just as good as another.  

This I disagree, that was not the case originally. It is arbitrary today because it doesn't really matter anymore/or care.

> The LSB bas value exactly to the 
> extent that every distribution follows it to the point that 3rd party 
> software will work without regard to the distribution and I don't see 
> that happening without installer contortions yet.   Other changes 
> without backwards compatible symlinks just break things and 
> are annoying.
> 
> -- 
>    Les Mikesell
>      lesmikesell at gmail.com
> 

The LSB is useful for commercial distributions not really for free distributions. I don't see commercial vendors releasing software for Fedora because it changes too much, they can't test against it changing every 6 or so months.  I experience this every day here at my place. 3rd party vendors do not like rapid changes especially mathematical applications that are particularly  sensitive to GCC optimizations, GNU libc, and GNU libstdc++ changes. The LSB doesn't go far enough to guarantee such it only gives a ABI/API compatibility. This becomes critical when your math library is off by 0.06 fractions, ask FLUENT this.

Shawn.




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