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by linuxftw 2816 days ago
> Personally, the amount of times that this "packaging and updating infrastructure" has broken working applications or whole Linux installations leads me to believe that no amount of testing will ever make it work reliably.

What distributions have you been using? I rarely have a problem with Debian or Fedora in this manner.

> It doesn't stop at PPA, to really support all the other picky Linux guys with their distributions I need to provide dozens of packages built against the dependencies of whichever versions of those distributions are currently in use.

Get your package into Debian and Fedora, other distros might pick it up. If your software is popular enough, someone might volunteer to do the packaging for you. If it's something I care about and not available, I'll compile it (if it's a compiled language). If it's something I care about and it needs to go into production, I'd build and maintain my own rpms or debs internally.
1 comments
zeroname 2816 days ago
> What distributions have you been using? I rarely have a problem with Debian or Fedora in this manner.

Fedora and especially Arch are big offenders. Debian is so "stable" that I can't install newer software through the provided packages anyway, so that's trading off one failure over another.

> Get your package into Debian and Fedora...

If you stay inside the FOSS bubble, of course maybe some maintainer will eventually spend their precious time packaging some version of your application in some (sometimes broken) fashion. I don't think that's a good solution even for FOSS, but for non-FOSS it's not even on the table.

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linuxftw 2816 days ago
> Debian is so "stable" that I can't install newer software through the provided packages anyway, so that's trading off one failure over another.

I've already addressed this, it's pretty trivial to recompile most major software packages. You can also pull those packages from testing or unstable.

> but for non-FOSS it's not even on the table.

Sucks to be a proprietary software vendor. You have to do all this hard work for people to not buy your product anyway.

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zeroname 2816 days ago
> I've already addressed this, it's pretty trivial to recompile most major software packages.

Is it not obvious that outside of the Linux bubble people are not looking forward to invest their precious time into such things?

> Sucks to be a proprietary software vendor. You have to do all this hard work for people to not buy your product anyway.

Of course the alternative is to just ignore Linux users like most proprietary software vendors do.

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