Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by admax88q 2587 days ago
> The fact that I can recompile all of the software I use, is a really important feature to me and not a distribution problem.

I've always found this to be an interesting observation about free software. So many complicated things like FatELF, dll-hell are just straight up _not_ and issue when you're working in a source code world where you just compile the software for the machine you're using it on.

Most of the efforts around FatELF, FlatPak, etc seem to be to be driven by the desires of corporations who want to ship proprietary software on linux, and as such need better standardization at the binary level rather than the software level.

It's a win for Free Software in my mind, that we shouldn't typically have to worry about this added complexity. Just ship source code, and distributions can ship binaries compiled for each specific configuration that they choose to support.
3 comments
Crinus 2587 days ago
Note that source code access and FOSS are orthogonal. AFAIK in older Unix systems software you'd buy would often be in source code form. In fact at the past severa lLinux distributions had a lot of such software.

As an example Slackware distributes a shareware image viewer/manipulator called xv (which was very popular once upon a time): http://www.trilon.com/xv/

It is the license that makes something FOSS, not being able to compile/modify the source code.

link
CJefferson 2587 days ago
Well, except I work on a large open source project and we have to blacklist random versions of gmp and gcc out code doesn't work with due to bugs.

And, we can't reasonably test with every version of the compiler and libraries, so we just have to wait for bug reports, then try to find out what's wrong.

Whereas I pick one set of all the tools, make a docker image, and then run 60 cpu days of tests. No Linux distro is going to do that much testing.

link
AnIdiotOnTheNet 2587 days ago
> So many complicated things like FatELF, dll-hell are just straight up _not_ and issue when you're working in a source code world where you just compile the software for the machine you're using it on.

Said like someone who has never actually had to compile someone else's software. Why do you think so many projects these days have started shipping Docker containers of their build environment? Why are there things like autoconf?

link