Binary incompatibility of Linux distributions

[Christopher Chan]

Amedee Van Gasse (Ubuntu) wrote:
> 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?
>   
Maybe more convenient...surely you could tell a person to unzip, open 
Visual Studio Express, erm import project and then build?

> 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.
>   
But that has prerequisite knowledge on the user's part...like how files 
and directories are laid out in a Linux-based operating system.

>   
>>> 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.
>
>   

Wait for Derek's reply. He was the one who said that.