I got a call from a reporter today asking about the Red Hat JBoss deal. RedMonk hasn’t had a chance to tease out all the implications but here are some of my immediate thoughts: The acquisition makes sense-bringing together as…

I got a call from a reporter today asking about the RedHat JBoss deal. RedMonk hasn’t had a chance to tease out all the implications but here are some of my immediate thoughts: The acquisition makes sense-bringing together as it…

This is a common problem with COM dlls in Windows. It was thought to be a good idea initially, because the user would always have the latest and presumably least buggiest shared component installed. In practice, it caused several issues:

1. Uninstallation difficulties. Before reference counting was introduced when an application was removed it removed shared components that is used by other applications.

2. Lack of component isolation. Software has been tested and certified against a certain set of program components. Some of the components used might just happen to work because of the presence of a particular bug in another dependent component. If a new software package is installed and replaces a buggy component with a fixed one, it will break another app.

Microsoft has actually more experience in this area than portage.

The value of the Gentoo developer to Microsoft is

a) it helps MS understand the competition a bit better. CLR and JVM are already JITing on the machines which software is being run on, so in a sense it is not much different to Gentoo. The idea here is to better get into the mind of the people who use Gentoo why there would be such a preference. In theory, what Gentoo could build would represent the most optimized system that Linux is capable of. If MS wants to run comparisons, this would have to be the target to match.

b) There is also a slight advantage to MS by decreasing the velocity of Gentoo development.

in any event, i'm not attempting that Portage is the only or even best approach. that's why i cited other equivalent functions. it works best for me, but i don't recommend most users use Gentoo b/c it is, as you note, distro that emphasizes source builds. and we further agree that source is not going to be ideal for mainstream users.

that said, there's nothing in Portage that's restricted to source builds – there are many binary applications available.

either way, Red Hat's up2date is just fine – i've got nothing against it. if that works for you, go with it.

Portage is just the context here anyway – it's really the larger reaction that's most interesting.

Again from my understanding what makes Gentoo unique is the build dependencies from source capability. I'm just not convinced that capability will every be required by the mainstream.

I will admit I am biased as a long time RedHat user.

as for build from source, that's more a choice that Gentoo offers. while the bulk of applications are built from source, Portage is equally capable of installing binaries. many people do this for OOo or other large applications.