That’s actually an intentional nudge to make the software packaged by the distro, which usually implies that they are open source.

Who needs ABI compatibility when your software is OSS? You only need API compatibility at that point.

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rep_lodsb 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So every Linux distribution should compile and distribute packages for every single piece of open source software in existence, both the very newest stuff that was only released last week, and also everything from 30+ years ago, no matter how obscure.

Because almost certainly someone out there will want to use it. And they should be able to, because that is the entire point of free software: user freedom.

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rixed 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Those users will either check the source code and compile it themself, with all the proper options to match their system; or rely on a software distribution to do it for them.

People who are complaining would prefer a world of isolated apps downloaded from signed stores, but Linux was born at an optimistic time when the goal was software that cooperate and form a system, and which distribution does not depend on a central trusted platform.

I do not believe that there is any real technical issue discussed here, just drastically different goals.

	▲	ogogmad 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		No. People would prefer the equivalent of double-click `setup.exe`. Were you being serious?

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kwanbix 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am not an expert on this, but my question is, how does windows manages to achieve it? Why can't Linux do the same?

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johnny22 9 hours ago | parent [-]

because they care about ABI/API stability.

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nineteen999 3 hours ago | parent [-]

And have an ever decreasing market share, in desktop, hypervisor and server space. The API/ABI stability is probably the only thing stemming the customer leakage at all. It's not the be all and end all.

	▲	ogogmad 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Decreasing market share in the desktop?

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kccqzy 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Your tone makes it sound like this is a bad thing. But from a user’s perspective, I do want a distro to package as much software as possible. And it has nothing to do with user freedom. It’s all about being entitled as a user to have the world’s software conveniently packaged.

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Rohansi 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Software installed from your package manager is almost certainly provided as a binary already. You could package a .exe file and that should work everywhere WINE is installed.

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kccqzy 8 hours ago | parent [-]

That's not my point. My point is that if executable A depends on library B, and library B does not provide any stable ABI, then the package manager will take care of updating A whenever updating B. Windows has fanatical commitment to ABI stability, so the situation above does not even occur. As a user, all the hard work dealing with ABI breakages on Linux are done by the people managing the software repos, not by the user or by the developer. I'm personally very appreciative of this fact.

	▲	Rohansi an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, it's better than nothing, but it's certainly not ideal. How much time and energy is being wasted by libraries like that? Wouldn't it be better if library B had a stable ABI or was versioned? Is there any reason it needs to work like this?

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grishka 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What if you want to use a newer or older version of just one package without having to update or downgrade the entire goddamn universe? What if you need to use proprietary software?

I've had so much trouble with package managers that I'm not even sure they are a good idea to begin with.

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Maskawanian 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I know you are trying to make a point about complexity, but that is literally what NixOS allows for.

	▲	ogogmad 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		NixOS is an argument in favour of whatever the opposite of Nix is.

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realusername 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not sure if it's the right solution but it's a description of what happens right now in practice yes.

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bruce511 16 hours ago | parent [-]

It also makes support more or less impossible.

Even if we ship as source, even if the user has the skills to build it, even if the make file supports every version of the kernel, plus all other material variety, plus who knows how many dependencies, what exactly am I supposed to do when a user reports;

"I followed your instructions and it doesn't run".

Linux Desktop fails because it's not 1 thing, it's 100 things. And to get anything to run reliably on 95 of them you need to be extremely competent.

Distribution as source fails because there are too many unknown, and dependent parts.

Distribution as binary containers (Docker et al) are popular because it gives the app a fighting chance. While at the same time being a really ugly hack.

	▲	tuna74 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Then you only support 1 distro. If anyone wants to use your software on an unsupported distro they can figure out the rest themselves.
	▲	josephg 15 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yep. But docker doesn’t help you with desktop apps. And everything becomes so big! I think Rob pike has the right idea with go just statically link everything wherever possible. These days I try to do the same, because so much less can go wrong for users. People don’t seem to mind downloading a 30mb executable, so long as it actually works.

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johncolanduoni 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even open-source software has to deal with the moving target that is ABI and API compatibility on Linux. OpenSSL’s API versioning is a nightmare, for example, and it’s the most critical piece of software to dynamically link (and almost everything needs a crypto/SSL library).

Stable ABIs for certain critical pieces of independently-updatable software (libc, OpenSSL, etc.) is not even that big of a lift or a hard tradeoff. I’ve never run into any issues with macOS’s libc because it doesn’t version the symbol for fopen like glibc does. It just requires commitment and forethought.

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SkiFire13 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Everyone is mentioning ABI, but this is really an API problem, so "you only need API compatibility at that point" is a very big understatement.