Re:Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
by disintegore on Thursday November 21, 2019 @05:58PM
(#21600677)
If your software is FLOSS, that's an integration problem for distro maintainers to solve and it hinges on said libraries being versioned properly. The bigger distros usually have 10,000+ packages and those are downloaded, installed and updated automatically which cannot be said of almost all Windows and OS X software. Really, only Android and iOS offer a similar experience.
If your software is proprietary (or not popular enough to be found in most repos), there's always container technologies like Snap/AppImage/FlatPak/etc.
As a Windows dev I find both of these to be vastly superior to the standard Windows practice of shipping every DLL that's not in system32 alongside your executable, on top of whatever VC++ redistributables and/or .NET framework might not be present on the system.
Re:Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
by dependenttypes on Thursday November 21, 2019 @05:12PM
(#21600278)
Just static link? Or do what windows software does, so ship dynamic libraries with your application. I do not see the issue.
> There is no well-defined "Linux platform"
There actually is! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base
Core libraries like glibc and Xlib are pretty well defined. You need to ship your own copy of the widget library of choice, but that isn't a big deal. You could even ship an Xlib copy and rely on the fact that there is an X server speaking the same protocol. It's all perhaps a bit messy, but it works.
But which versions of which libraries do you target? Every distribution has its own menagerie. There is no well-defined "Linux platform" like there is with Windows (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/).