[wellylug] Microsoft At WellyLUG last night.

[Ewen McNeill]

In message <1121295506.42d59c9231d4e at www.paradise.net.nz>, jfouhy at paradise.net.n
z writes:
>Quoting Pete Black <pete at marchingcubes.com>:
>> And when a Debian-based distro makes the same decision, and introduces 
>> significantly different components from the 'core' debian, resulting in
>> a problems installing those packages on a vanilla Debian - will you 
>> accuse Debian of 'locking you in'?
>
>Incidentally, I have heard that this is happening, with .debs built for Ubuntu
>not always being compatible with standard Debian ...

Amongst other reasons this is because Ubuntu choose to recompile all the
packages prior to release, whereas Debian just release whatever has
trickled down to "testing" at the point they call it stable.  This can
occassionally lead to Debian packages which cannot be built within the
testing/stable distribution.

Also with earlier Ubuntu releases they were based on Sarge/Unstable
rather than based on Debian Stable (because Debian stable was rather old
until a few months ago), which leads to various library dependency
issues.  (Generally you can recompile the packages to get around it.)

FWIW, if you want binary (ABI) compatibility between distributions the
best chance is LSB (Linux Standards Base) which is attempting to
standardise the ABI.  It's still not as widely supported as would be
ideal.

Otherwise it's generally better to recompile packages if you're taking
them to a different distribution/version/etc.  Both .debs and .rpms
(.srpms) come with pretty good tools for doing that, and if the
dependencies are satisfied it's a pretty easy task.

Finally this is often a smaller issue in the Debian/.deb world than it
is in the RedHat/SuSE/etc world, largely because there's much more
software packaged in the base Debian than there is as base RedHat or SuSE
rpms.  It also helps that Debian is still the "centre" of the .deb
universe, whereas the .rpm universe has three major draws (RedHat,
Novell/SuSE, and Mandriva (or whatever they're called this week)).

Ewen