Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption (warning: long rant follows)

[Darragh Bailey]

On 14/02/06, Rickey Moore <wayward4now at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> Yum is a step in the right direction, but we REALLY need more
> cohesion between the distros. I used to use Caldera. Caldera used
> /opt like Debian used /usr/local like RedHat uses /usr/share... and
> that's just three of them. Debian used tarballs, RPM caught on with
> many of the others, now there's more packages managers, and I just
> used one called .package recently that automated tarball building and
> resolved dependencies pretty slick. That was a very neat effort, but
> it just added another package manager to the list.



As someone who has had to repackage windows software I had to disagree. The
number of custom installers in the windows world is truely rediculous.

Standard install mechanisms I seen
Windows Installer (msi)
SMS (exe)
InstallShield (exe)
Install AnyWhere (java)
Batch files (bat)

After that is a maze of custom installer formats created by the companies
themselves instead of using the standard tools.

Try converting between any of these and you'll start to really understand
the nightmare that is the windows installation world.

Windows apps will work fine provided they don't have to integrate with other
apps, but watch out for different installers stomping all over one another.


linux basically has 3
deb
rpm
tarball

plus a new one that has recently appeared autopackage

In addition there are a number of tools that can convert between deb and rpm
(quite well actually, see alien), and many tarballs contain the files to
generate the rpm & deb packages.


It is much easier for people who know what they are doing to convert between
linux packages than for windows, all you need to find is someone friendly
who is willing to do that work.

--
Darragh Bailey
"Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool"
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