RPMs and *.desktop files

[Sean Middleditch]

On Wed, 2004-03-03 at 14:23, Scott Wheeler wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> On Wednesday 03 March 2004 20:11, Julius Schwartzenberg wrote:
> > I have pretty good experiences with using packages not made for my 
> > distro actually. [...]
> 
> > Many programs today also come in with single installer that works for 
> > all Linux distros (Mozilla, OpenOffice.org for example).
> 
> All of the applications that you mentioned are almost self contained -- they 
> largely don't contain external dependencies or assumptions about system 
> layout.  Such is not the case for application which use more of the 
> "platform" such as GNOME or KDE applications or things built around them.

Frameworks like GNOME and KDE should (and do) have very stable ABI
interfaces; there is absolutely no reason to assume that they will have
problems unless the distribution went out of their way to break it.  (In
which case you can call the distribution unsupported.)  This is the
reason GNOME (and I assume KDE) have solid rules on upgrade procedures,
library naming/versioning, etc.

Even the big problems like some distros preferring /usr while some
prefer /opt/whatever are worked around by these standards (base dir
specification) along with things like relocatable RPMs, autopackage's
libprefix, and so on.

If there are any major desktop platform issues that make this untrue, it
should be considered a bug and be fixed, not just a hand wave and "oh,
don't expect it to work, ever."  That doesn't do much for the
user/developer other than tell them to use a different platform.  ;-)

-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.