From: pmacdona@sanjuan (Peter MacDonald) Subject: Re: Binary Distributions Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1993 17:11:20 GMT
In article <1993Feb6.152729.20186@midway.uchicago.edu> goer@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Torvalds) writes:
>>
>>I generally like doing my own ports of things, but I've found I do it
>>less and less now, and I'm personally glad there are binary releases for
>>most things (especially for bigger things like xview etc). As to "only
>>around 40-50M free", there are lots of people who don't have that much.
>
>But Linux - er, Linus - *you're* not the problem!
>
>The problem is when somebody tries Linux out, snarfs a binary, and then
>runs it. If it doesn't work, there may be a version incompatibility, or
>there may be a bug in either the software itself or Linux, or there may
>be a simple configuration problem. Also, being a long-time hacker, *you*
>know where you want to put everything, and you know all your software
>versions (or can easily find this out). Unless a binary package is very
>well designed, and deposits its file inventory and version number in a
>standard place (e.g. under SCO, it's /etc/perms), hopeless confusion can
>arise. The user, for instance, has no idea whether a given file is needed
>or not, or whether it should be overwritten, or whether it should have
>been overwritten :-). Unless installed via some standard configuration
>mechanism, binaries are like the devil to newcomers.
Well, I am notorious for getting sucked into this long drawn out threads...
But here is my 1/4 byte anyways...
This reminds me of one reason I started SLS. In my younger more niave days (last
year) I thought it would be great to have an OS where everyone had the full source.
Then if there was a problem, they had at least the possibility of fixing it.
You could just distribute the source, and then type "make all". Great!
Then reality hit.
1) Compiling takes a long time. SLS might take 30 days to compile
on my 386/25. (kernel takes ~2 hours, IV took 2 days).
2) You need mucho disk space. I think if all of SLS was just distributed
as source with which you could type "make all" you would need about
1 Gig of disk space, unless it cleaned up after itself as it went.
3) Ripple effects of changes to the headers/libs means that the above
"make all" source distribution is impractical. Things break.
4) Many packages do need tweaking to get them to compile.
5) New versions of stuff is coming out ALL THE TIME.
6) The biggest reason: if even some of the energy expended on the
above source build was redirected towards fixing/finishing/enhancing
the current system, Linux should grow faster.
The source distribution makes sense to me, only when a CDROM player that is both
cheap (<$200) and universal (isn't limited to SCSI) becomes available under
Linux. Even then, having the binary distribution there is more relevant,
until the 1 GIP intel processor and the 50 Meg/sec harddisks arrive.
Peter