Installing WordPerfect (was Re:RPM compatability)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 01:01:52PM -0500, Anthony de Boer wrote:
> And it would be a separate build on each, with porting issues to deal
> with.  Windows binaries under emulation gave them just the single build
> target, one set of binaries fits all, and dumped the system differences
> in Wine's lap.  And, in theory, fixing Wine to run WP would go a long
> ways toward helping other programs run on that platform too.

Actually it probably was the same code base for all of the unix
versions.  They are all fairly posix compliant and all run X, so it
would have made very little sense to have any significant code changes
between builds.

> Linux does give a much bigger install base on the Unix side than we used
> to have, but even so there are differences, and packaging something for
> one distro doesn't get it working on the others immediately.  LSB helps,
> but unfortunately not quite to the point yet that someone can release a
> generic "Linux" package that you can just plunk in regardless of your
> distro or consider preferable to your native package flavour.  So long as
> you can release an opensource tarball and generate enough interest and
> demand that distro people package RPMs, debs, ebuilds, and whatever else
> for you, you're okay, but the community has a bit of a history of not
> making things easy for commercial software.

Well the packaging issue would be a pain, but hey they only really
supported redhat, just like many others that seem to think linux support
= redhat support.  wine of course makes no difference to that issue what
so ever.

A few commercial companies get it (like opera) and have no problem
supporting many distributions.  Most however have no idea how to work
with anyone outside their own little corporate world.  They are to used
to dictating terms of how just must install and use their product,
without any interest in feedback of how to improve things.

--
Len Sorensen
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