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I understand the marketing perspective, but you missed my point.
I could care less if they only want to put out the rpm binaries, it's
the source I am after anyway. But the source is getting harder and
harder to find. Unless it's in a srpm format.
Thomas, if you write something to break up rpms into the tar.gz file, I
would be very interested in that. Also, I'm going to look into alien.
I've never heard of that.
I myself would more than likely only put out an rpm if I was a large
company writing software, but I'd like to think that I would only
release tar.gz files instead. Maybe build a generic installer, or use
loki's installer. I appreciate all that Red Hat does for the open
source community, but the Microsoft of the linux world is beginning to
bother me.
As long as they continue to put out tar.gz files of the source,
everything is peachy, but when it only comes in srpms linux will begin
to fall apart. That's just my opinion. Unless there is an easy option
for getting the source out of the srpm.
Kurt comes to mind on this one. Kde of course wants the largest market
share of the desktop for it's Gnu/Linux users. The developers for kde
work their asses off (without funding like the ximian group <none that I
know of, but I don't use kde, so I don't pay attention, honestly>) to
put out some very impressive software. I built all the kde 2.2.1
packages from source and have it running on my slack system so I could
see it, and though I've never much liked Kde, I must say, it's awesome.
Back to my point, I can go to any kde mirror and find the tar.gz files,
some in binary, others in source. And also the rpm's. But always I can
find the tar.gz
On the other hand, I remember a few months ago I went to the ximian site
to get the source for something and after jumping through an hours worth
of hoops and not finding any source outside of srpms, I gave up... Later
I found that any source I want I have to get from the Debian
directories, and it's usually a development cycle behind.
Or maybe I'm just continually looking in the wrong spots. Though ximian
has straightened out a little bit. It's still a pain in the ass to get
the source for all the ximian stuff if I wanted to build ximian gnome
from source...
Not that I'd want to anyway. Gnome bothers me quite a bit as well!=20
Can't wait for E 17. But I'm addicted to Evolution. And now with well
over 4k messages in different folders spread through many directories
and vfolders, I'm too hooked to switch to kmail. So I still use gnome,
or the libraries anyway. =20
Enough ranting... who's next.?
nathan
On Sun, 2001-10-07 at 16:09, George Toft wrote:
> I would look at it from a marketing perspective. Each of the
> distros you cited are backed by a company. I believe Slack is
> supported only by Patrick V. Also, look at the market share.
> Red Hat has 55-60% market share, Caldera 10%, and all others=20
> are less that that. Caldera and Mandrake are Red Hat spin-offs.
> So what it comes down to is how much effort is a company willing
> to spend on a distro (Slack) that has under 5% market share?
> Anyone willing to use Slack or Debian presumable knows enough
> to get it to work anyway, so they really don't need to support
> it.
>=20
> Looking at it another way, knowing that Netscape has under 20%
> market share, more and more web sites are being designed to work
> only with I.E. Why? The effort to appease the 15-20% is not
> worth the effort. That thought is more valid with only 5%
> market share.
>=20
> Of course, some will say that 5% is worth going after. Loki
> thought so, that's why we have some games. Linux on the=20
> desktop is about 5% market share - Windows taking up the=20
> other 95%.
>=20
> George
>=20
>=20
> Rick Rosinski wrote:
> >=20
> > Over time, I have noticed (as did everybody else, no doubt) that when
> > checking for compatibility / requirements for most of the software out =
there
> > (Notably, StarOffice), they support RedHat, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake, and=
even
> > YellowDog, and of course, Solaris. But they do not support Slackware, =
even
> > though they provide a tarball binary (so it isn't because of any packag=
e
> > management). This really irritates me, and I worry about future releas=
es of
> > my programs will no longer work on a Slackware system. I don't want to=
have
> > to change to one of the above distributions just because of some major
> > oversight of one of the first - and ongoing - distributions of Linux.
> >=20
> > Any comments, rants, verifications, discredits, etc.?
> >=20
> > --
> > Rick Rosinski
> > http://rickrosinski.com
> > rick@rickrosinski.com
> > ________________________________________________
> > See http://PLUG.phoenix.az.us/navigator-mail.shtml if your mail doesn't=
post to the list quickly and you use Netscape to write mail.
> >=20
> > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
> > http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
> ________________________________________________
> See http://PLUG.phoenix.az.us/navigator-mail.shtml if your mail doesn't p=
ost to the list quickly and you use Netscape to write mail.
>=20
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
> http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
--=20
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,
but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
-- Albert Einstein
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