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Besides... have you seen what happens when people are actually successful at pushing compatibility? Have you seen the shit people throw at Lennart/RH for System

Besides... have you seen what happens when people are actually successful at pushing compatibility? Have you seen the shit people throw at Lennart/RH for Systemd? Why would anyone ever want to play that game? Let's not bait with systemd, that's a different issue. Package manager interoperability is certainly a political issue. A lot of distributions are identified by their PM infrastructure, so adopting a universal one like Nix or Guix would mean losing their identity. Conflict of interest, quite clearly. We might end up with, GNOME-based distros at least, running a NIH version of Nix called xdg-app, however.

scrollaway 11y ago
Package management is the least of our worries when it comes to cross-distro compatibility. What truly affects companies wanting to release and support their software on multiple distributions is the lack of universal fat-apps. And yes, xdg-app is the way to go - sadly, only GNOME has been leading that front and cross-desktop talks have stopped. The XDG mailing list is dead. Sending an email there is equivalent to pissing in a violin. Meh, I'm pretty jaded. But I totally do think systemd is a clear example of what happens when a group tries to push for less NIH and more standardization. Tools get replaced and people get upset.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  xdg-app is a prime example of NIH. It poorly reinvents reproducible, deterministic and isolated builds when battle-tested and academically sound solutions like Nix are available off the shelf. People refusing to adopt it is a good thing in my book, it'll only be harmful in the long term. The Linux community has rejected fat apps (primarily fat ELF binaries) many times, so that's not out of the ordinary. I find the idea of systemd being less NIH to be quite baffling, though. Just look at its ad-hoc LISTEN_FDs protocol rather than adopting something well designed like UCSPI.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  "fat-apps"? What is the difference between that and a tar.gz with all dependencies included? Mozilla offer Firefox that way, Opera used to offer, well, Opera that way (until they wen't full retard and cloned Chrome). Heck, a RPM is pretty much a fancy tar.gz at first glance (and a DEB a bit more elaborate). I swear i wonder of far up the devops exhaust channel the Linux userspace thinking has gone these days...

scrollaway 11y ago

Package management is the least of our worries when it comes to cross-distro compatibility. What truly affects companies wanting to release and support their software on multiple distributions is the lack of universal fat-apps. And yes, xdg-app is the way to go - sadly, only GNOME has been leading that front and cross-desktop talks have stopped. The XDG mailing list is dead. Sending an email there is equivalent to pissing in a violin. Meh, I'm pretty jaded. But I totally do think systemd is a clear example of what happens when a group tries to push for less NIH and more standardization. Tools get replaced and people get upset.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
xdg-app is a prime example of NIH. It poorly reinvents reproducible, deterministic and isolated builds when battle-tested and academically sound solutions like Nix are available off the shelf. People refusing to adopt it is a good thing in my book, it'll only be harmful in the long term. The Linux community has rejected fat apps (primarily fat ELF binaries) many times, so that's not out of the ordinary. I find the idea of systemd being less NIH to be quite baffling, though. Just look at its ad-hoc LISTEN_FDs protocol rather than adopting something well designed like UCSPI.
digi_owl 11y ago
"fat-apps"? What is the difference between that and a tar.gz with all dependencies included? Mozilla offer Firefox that way, Opera used to offer, well, Opera that way (until they wen't full retard and cloned Chrome). Heck, a RPM is pretty much a fancy tar.gz at first glance (and a DEB a bit more elaborate). I swear i wonder of far up the devops exhaust channel the Linux userspace thinking has gone these days...