Binary incompatibility of Linux distributions

[Amedee Van Gasse (Ubuntu)]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 16:10, Chan Chung Hang Christopher wrote:

> No, he said: "The difference here is that Linux actually makes installing
>
>
> from source so easy, relatively speaking, it becomes a visible option to
> the masses, whereas in Windows word, that kind of procedure would be way
> too daunting to even be considered among non-developers."
>
> and 'I' asked him whether he thinks 'tar zxf tarball.tgz, cd tarball,
> ./configure, make,
> make install' is 'so easy'.

Compared to the Windows world, yes it is a lot easier.

To do something similar on Windows, you would have to install Visual
Studio, which is very expensive, or Visual Studio Express, which doesn't
have all the whistles and bells of the full Visual Studio.
Perhaps there are other "free" software development solutions for Windows,
I don't know. But while gcc (and friends) is most used on Linux, Visual
Studio is most used on Windows. Let's not argue about that, shall we?

To compile a package from source in Linux, you have to go to a console and
type the following:

tar -xvf source.tar.gz
cd directory
./configure
make
sudo make install

5 little lines of text that can be put on a website for easy copy/pasting.

For the Windows trolls/fanboys: there is absolutely no way whatsoever that
you can do something similar with Visual Studio by copy/pasting five lines
to a console. If there is, please enlighten me.

>> Er, yes, that's _exactly_ why they weren't included.  Debian always
>> included the components of "build-essential".  Ubuntu explicitly chose
>> to not include it because it was intended as an "end-user" distro, and
>> "would not be needed by most users".

Is that true?
I haven't noticed, because I always install my Ubuntu "the Debian way"
with debootstrap, and build-essential is always one of the packages that I
install with debootstrap.
If a regular Ubuntu doesn't install build-essential, I consider that a bug
and I will file a bug report about it.

-- 
Amedee