few ideas how to make fedora better as a desktop

[Horst H. von Brand]

Shawn Starr <sstarr at platform.com> wrote:

[...]

> 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.

On commercial distributions it matters for consistency from one version to
the next, and across distributions.

On free distributions it matters for consistency with the commercial branch
(one of the reasons for me to use Fedora is consistency with RHEL/CentOS).
Also, it is important for people who build their own software. The most
irritating differences between systems are precisely the minor, gratuitous
ones. Thus FHS and such.

[Yes, I did live through the hell of SunOS to Solaris (BSD style to
 SysVr4), and stuff like changing paths and minor differences in command
 syntax were the worst of that. Plus the mess of futzing around with the
 configuration of software resetting installation paths until upstream
 catched on.]
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
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