On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 3:04 PM, Olav Vitters <olav(a)vitters.nl> wrote:
This highlights a concern, not a "fatal flaw". The flaw IMO
is within
the distribution method.
No, the fatal flaw is that we don't really have an OS one can build
applications on: the ABI is unstable and insufficient. So the choices
are either constantly rebuilding and patching (what distributions do)
or bundling (what non-distribution mechanisms do).
Say you have this new application and you want to provide it to
(most)
Linux users *now* (not 6+ months later). There should be an answer for
that.
Letting developers provide a custom application format is not actually
solving this: the difficult part is not making something "available on
the internet", but making it "reachable by the users". This, in
practice, always ends up as one or a very small number of centralized
places - _the_ distribution, _the_ app store, _the_
amazon.com. And
the difficulty of getting a set of bits to
amazon.com / an app store /
a RPM is very similar.
Mirek