Re: Biweekly Promotions

On Thu, 2006-12-21 at 08:12 -0500, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
> Are you suggesting you won't want to see a binary distribution under  
> the GPL?

No, without binaries it all becomes a bit of an academic exercises
doesn't it :)

What I am saying is that a free software project is all about sharing
sources between developers and users. You have to make creating binaries
from that source as easy as possible of course (configure && make &&
make install). And for that it is nice to have some packagers from the
various distros on the team to make sure you make it as easy as possible
for your users to create binaries of what you produce. But in the end it
is about developers quickly trying out their own builds and changes. I
don't actually know of any free software project that provides anything
else than source code as the main way of distributing their work. You
then get expert groups like jpackage, Fedora, Debian, etc. to create
tailor made binaries for their specific target audiences.

> Distros know what libraries and file layouts are, but if you don't
> you are often resolved to shipping huge staticly linked binaries
> (and it always makes the ppc/ppc64, sparc, alpha, arm, s390 or
> mips/mipsel people unhappy because you forgot about them again...).
> 
> Yes, that stuff is hard, but it's been done :)

Precisely! Debian is there for 11 architectures. And I am happy they
ship sources and binaries for all of them for the various projects I
work on. But that also shows that you want to work with the distros to
push those binaries out to the users (they also provide a nice filter
for getting quality feedback).

Cheers,

Mark