On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 04:41:04PM -0500, Benjamin Johnson wrote:
On Mon, 27 Dec 2010 15:38:55 -0500, Jorge Arellano Cid <jcid@dillo.org> wrote:
Mainly GNU/Linux flavours.
Most of them have a policy of not packing unreleased libraries (quite understandable if you ask me). FLTK-2.0 was never released so, as a most unfortunate side effect, we were left out of the repositories.
That makes sense, though then again I've seen a lot of "released" code in distributions much worse than FLTK-2.0...
One thing I like about Windows development is that, with comparatively little effort, you can produce a single executable that runs on any Windows system. Binary compatibility isn't possible to nearly that extent on Linux/Unix -- the software, even the culture makes it limited and extremely difficult at best. Part of the reason I stopped Unix development, but I digress. I know you probably see things a bit differently.
I don't develop nor have a Windows machine, but have heard of DLL hell (in the same sense as RPM hell ;). Anyway, the point seems clear to me. In the very old days, with an Atari 800XL (or C64), developers had a great time. Binaries, and even HW tricks were portable! These days, as you point out, it's very hard to acieve binary compatibility with GNU/Linux (HW is different, distros are different, libraries are different). If the problem was left to the user, no progress could be made (most don't know what is to compile, and shouldn't need IMHO). This is mainly solved by the distro-packaged-SW, which users feel comfortable with. That's the reason why it's so important for us to be back on this kind of repositories. -- Cheers Jorge.-