Binary compatibility on Linux

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Sun, 11 Nov 2012 12:45:56 +0100
Joseph Rushton Wakeling <joseph.wakeling at webdrake.net> wrote:

> On 11/11/2012 11:57 AM, Thomas Koch wrote:
> > So by getting your package in the archives of Debian and Fedora,
> > you should serve the large majority of linux users.
> 
> Which is well and good, but doesn't address the problem that software
> developers face, which is "How can I make directly available binaries
> of my programs that will work for any Linux user?"
> 

I'm not a Linux expert, but I'm fairly certain the answer is "You
can't". Linux is very good at a lot of things, but standardization is
definitely not one of them. Linux is just far too divergent ("herding
cats" comes to mind) for a widely-compatible binary to be realistic.
The best that can be done is make a dead-simple-to-use script to grab
dependencies (isolated from the rest of the system if need be) and
compile.

> It's useful to be able to do that regardless of whether your software
> is FOSS and regardless of whether or not it's in distro repositories,
> because your latest release will always take time to propagate to the
> distros and because not everyone is comfortable compiling from source.