Eric DeLong wrote on 27/06/2007 17:31:42:
I guess, though I don't know enough about linux... For example, my
understanding is that each major distro may package different
modules.
Sort of. You may get some application that is packaged for easy
installation and automatic upgrades for RedHat, but the same application
is not packaged by Ubuntu. Part of this is due to different package
management tools (of which there are only three or so that are widely
used). In my experience, this is mostly limited to the more esoteric
tools, and there seems to be a much greater difference at the user level
than at the system level.
How can IBM create WDSCi so that it is not tied to a
specific distribution of linux?
Well, it sort of depends on what exactly the Windows-specific code in WDSC
is doing. If it is GUI code, then they ought to be able to port that code
to whatever Eclipse uses to be platform independent, though I expect it
would be a fairly large undertaking. There are a number of FLOSS
(free/libre open source software) libraries that provide
platform-independent tools for GUI, audio, filesystem access, etc. Take
for example wxWindows (
http://www.wxwidgets.org/) and SDL
(www.libsdl.org).
IBM will not distribute the source,
so you could not expect to build it for different environments?...
You wouldn't be able to rebuild WDSC, but if the Windows-specific code was
ported to use some sort of platform independent libraries, then as long as
those libraries were available as source, you should be able to build them
for any Linux distro (and possibly for other Unix-like systems as well).
Depending on the distro, it could be a major headache, but could probably
be done with some determination. The main problems I've run into with
building stuff that the distro doesn't provide are
1. Distro provides a library X which is required for many distro
applications, but the app you want to build requires a different version
of library X to work properly.
2. Distro provides a library X which is required for many distro
applications, and the app you want to build uses the same version. Then
you upgrade, and the library X version changes.
3. The app you want requires a kernel module that the distro does not
provide. You need to rebuild the kernel module each time your kernel is
updated.
4. You need to keep on top of security and functional updates to the
application on your own.
Hope that helps a bit,
Adam
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