[Wolves] Do I hate Linux?

[Alex Willmer]

On Sun, 2008-06-15 at 14:02 +0100, Wayne wrote:
> His points are padded and mostly irrelevent.

He is overly verbose. I disagree about the relevance of his points.

> "Another luser mantra that makes me cringe: "Linux has an awesome 
> software packaging system."
> So lets take roll, shall we? RPM? Deb? tar.gz? ebuild? Oh, there's
> only four of you? Oh, that's not so bad, right?"
> 
> Why doesn't he compare and contrast with Windows - which ONLY has ZIP,
> RAR, ACE, CAB, ARJ, ISO etc etc

First, those are archive formats not installation formats. Although I
agree, Windows is worse overall - it doesn't have any concept of
packaging, just an executable installer and maybe the uninstaller works.

However Linux Hater's point is valid. For certain users, such as
Independent Software Vendors, the installation system is less than
perfect. Having to target N packaging formats and M
distributions/releases is harder than creating a single executable that
covers most Windows versions.

Ideally from our POV, the ISV would release the source, we'd package it
and all would be well. Ideally from the ISV's POV, we would agree on a
single distro/package standard, stick to it and all would be well.
Realistically neither of those will happen soon, so here we are.

Alex