DebConf 14: QA with Linus Torvalds

What people said

NavinF · 2021-04 · Strong recommendation

It is best practice and I wish it was common practice, but there's a lot of friction in the way and some people will actively work against you. Static linking glibc is painful because the former maintainer has some strong opinions: [LINK] Most distros force you to dynamically link every dependency if you want them to package it. So the default build for most projects is dynamic You've stumbled on a holy war between distros and guys like you, me, and Linus Torvalds[1] that want to deploy a binary and just have it work everywhere. 1: [VIDEO] (Highly recommend watching Linus's answer ~6 minutes in)

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stiray · 2020-05 · Strong recommendation

Just listen to this. I bet you will recognize the speaker. [VIDEO] It is 100% to the point and nothing has changed in 6 years since (and not only on debian), except that the mess is being solved by docker. Which is crazy. And windows is heading into same direction (when I have seen the manifests the first thing I have said was... omg... .dll.1.4.3) Just additional info, to help you get into my mindset - system level developer for linux AND windows for 25 years. (anyway, I have thrown tomatoes into directions of two largest fanboy camps, guess what will happen? =/ )

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dottrap · 2014-09 · Strong recommendation

And to really drive the problem home, distributing binary packages for Linux is a complete nightmare. Linus Torvalds just laid out a whole bunch of the problems at DebConf14. [VIDEO] Go watch it. But some of the highlights: - .deb vs .rpm misses the whole point. The problem is application writers just want to ship an application binary for "Linux", but it is a nightmare. - Except for the kernel which strives for ABI stability, everything else in the Linux distros constantly break binary compatibility, including the most important library, glibc. - Package maintainers are forced to use shared libraries for everything, even packages that are unstable and not well used which means apps will break - You can't install packages under these systems as non-root - He ships binaries for his SCUBA diving app for Windows and OS X. He only ships source for Linux. That's sad. As somebody who has to ship binaries for multiple platforms, including Linux, I agree it is sad, and I often have to do the rough equivalent of static linking. (I dynamically link and ship copies of the libraries.) This also allows my users to install without root access. But whenever I'm asked to look at using a native packager, I made to cry trying to figure out all the idiosyncrasies of each packaging system, and then all the variations between each distro release. (Fedora vs Debian vs Ubuntu, and 12.04 LTS is different than 13.10 and 14.04.) As far as Apple development tools go. Heard of clang and llvm? A lot of L

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