Re: [school-discuss] Open Source CD distribution

[LM <lmemsm@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 3/16/12, Bill Ries-Knight <steelhoof@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The idea of selecting what apps will also depend on the various installers.
>  Fedora, SUSE, Ubuntu... the list goes on and there are few options that
> will fit all for a single disk.
>

My audience for the tech conference is going to be Windows users, so I
want to provide Open Source Windows applications.  Usually what
version of Windows the user runs isn't that much of an issue.  I've
been researching how to work out the portability aspects for Linux
systems and I've seen several projects that try to solve the problems.
 There is PortableLinuxApps ( http://portablelinuxapps.org/ ), Linux
Standard Base (
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/lsb ), CDE (
http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/cde.html ), projects like
ZeroInstall ( http://0install.net/ ), stow and xstow, compiling with
rpath and %origin, setting LD_RUN_PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH.  FreeBSD
has a method of creating more portable packages for the PC-BSD system.
There's a list of methods for creating portable applications on Linux here:
http://hacktolive.org/wiki/Methods_for_Portable_Applications_on_Linux
I keep thinking if you can separate the operating system from the
application's runtime libraries, you'd make the applications more
portable.  On Windows, it doesn't matter if your operating system was
built by the same C/C++ compiler you're using to build your
applications or not.  On Linux, they're intrinsically tied together
and if you update your compiler and kernel to incompatible C libraries
(like a different version of glibc) that replace your current
libraries, you need to rebuild the system from source.  Would like to
see a separation here and using something like LSB, another compiler
or a cross-compiler might possibly achieve that.

Would be very interested in hearing what others think of the methods
to make applications more portable on Linux and in hearing what others
have found were pros and cons for using any of them.

Sincerely,
Laura
http://www.distasis.com/cpp
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