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Esprit de Vore's posts Post Back to profile
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Ben S.

@mos_8502 @aphyr so if a game server admin who is not a developer wants to run my stuff on Linux, they have to convince a distro package maintainer to produce an ongoing formal release of my hobby stuff? That sounds terrible for both of us.

13 August at 19:37 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mastodon.sdf.org
9 comments
mos_8502 :verified:

@HunterZ @aphyr You don't need to be a developer to install a package from source. If it's built correctly, you just invoke

./configure && make && sudo make install

and it installs in /usr/local where third-party software goes.

13 August at 19:39 | Open on studio8502.ca
Ben S.

@mos_8502 @aphyr my software depends on third party libraries. Users may not have those at hand. They may not even have development tools installed, since they may not be developers. You're not seeing past the cushy bubble we exist in as developers.

13 August at 19:43 | Open on mastodon.sdf.org
mos_8502 :verified:

@HunterZ @aphyr I mean, none of this is your problem as the software author. Your job is to be the upstream source. Responsibility for making software available starts with you, making it available as a source tarball to distro maintainers (and anyone else who wants it), who then make it available to system admins, who then make it available to users. If the users are their own system admins, and they can't install a package from source, that's a "them" problem.

13 August at 19:46 | Open on studio8502.ca
Ben S.

@mos_8502 @aphyr so if it's a niche hobby project then there's no point bothering to support Linux, because it's not worth anyone's time to push through the friction of the package maintainer cathedral.

13 August at 20:08 | Open on mastodon.sdf.org
mos_8502 :verified:

@HunterZ @aphyr You can get most of the way there just publishing your package as a .deb and a .rpm. And I can't speak on Fedora, but getting packages into Debian isn't very hard. They don't even have to be free software.

13 August at 20:10 | Open on studio8502.ca
mos_8502 :verified:

@HunterZ @aphyr You could also do the "homebrew" thing and have a command line you can copy and paste to download and run a script that handles it all, but that is a touchy subject with some.

13 August at 20:11 | Open on studio8502.ca
Yuki 膤 ❄️ 🏳️‍⚧️

@mos_8502@studio8502.ca @HunterZ@mastodon.sdf.org @aphyr@woof.group you can also get away with statically compiling or shipping your app with every library needed to run your app, and targetting an old enough version of glibc, it usually does the trick

13 August at 20:18 | Open on groupe-tazor.com
Chartreuse

@mos_8502 @HunterZ @aphyr You don't even need to get the package into an official repo if you want, you can host your own with just your software or even just a .deb download on github or stuff.

13 August at 20:24 | Open on social.restless.systems
Chartreuse

@HunterZ @mos_8502 @aphyr I'd say the common thing most software I build from source does is have build notes in a Readme that lists the package names for those required libraries for a few common distros.

13 August at 20:25 | Open on social.restless.systems
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