Something that came up during the live recording of Linux Outlaws and Ubuntu-UK Podcast at OggCamp earlier today was the huge number of Linux distributions available, and whether this meant that developers, advocates and other people are spread too thinly between projects, and whether 3rd party and proprietary vendors are put off by the enormous range of options they are expected to support.
I think that people should be free to work on whatever they want to. Someone that is not happy with the way a particular project works is not as likely to make useful contributions as someone who is happy with it, from my point of view at least.
The point I raised in relation to 3rd party vendors especially is whether it would be possible to create (perhaps with some modification to one or other system) a type of hybrid package that contains the program’s files as well as the relevant package management information for both the deb and rpm package managers. I’m aware this is something that would be most useful for closed source software vendors, as distributions can do their own packaging of programs where licensing permits it, but as closed source vendors are interested in producing software to run on Linux I think there is nothing wrong with making that easier for them.
Someone (Popey?) pointed out that universal package managers have been tried several times and not worked, but I’m not sure this is quite the same idea. It’s not trying to create a universal package manager, just a universal package.
I’ve not yet done any investigating to see how feasible this would be, perhaps someone with a reasonable knowledge of both packaging systems could tell me why it would(n’t) work. I’d be interested to hear from anyone else what they think about this.
I know it doesn’t work with the package managers, but what about .bin files that you execute with sh NVIDIA*.bin ?
Those are pretty much universal as long as you have bash or an equivalent installed. I’m not sure, but just wanted to mention it.