Teapot Philosopher

This post is about the portability of binaries! The pre-compiled agents of the dark lord himself. Okay, I’m exaggerating and being a knob at once. So, binaries are what is commonly distributed by software vendors who want software installation for average users to be simple. That’s all well and good in Windows in many cases (I’ll leave the ratios to yourselves) but when it comes to Linux it’s nothing short of a nightmare. In fact, significantly worse, because if you pinch yourself you’ll know it’s reality.

Why is it a problem? Well, there are actually many reasons…

First of all, binary compatibility is defined by what versions of certain software your distribution has installed. Different distributions of Linux have different versions of software installed, and so binary compatibility is inconsistent. The LSB (Linux Standard Base) attempts to resolve this by creating a standard set of versions that distributions can conform to, in order to be compatible with each other.

Secondly, there are different tools used by different distributions to install software and therefore register it as installed so it can be uninstalled later if desired. This leads to a problem, because how is a software binary supposed to register when there are multiple tools which require you to register differently.

The LSB decided it would be a good idea for software binaries to use the following pattern.
Software Binary — API — Tool A / Tool B
API could also be taught to use Tool C and the Software Binary could be installed because it doesn’t need to know about it.
So you can use whatever Tool you like, so you can send the Software Binary to your friends even if they use a different Tool.
Unfortunately API was never made. We’re told to be patient…

I believe a significant reason for what I believe is the failure of the API is that we are trying to make existing technology work with the GUI and various tools which were never meant to be used in such a way and are difficult to use in such a way. It seems that the way out of this would be to either heavily modify an existing tool or start from scratch with the aim of providing a simplistic way to access various necessary tasks.

Liquidat covers this issue in greater detail.