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A comment on Show HN: Fast native RPM building from any distro, for any distro, via Docker. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: Fast native RPM building from any distro, for an... by peterwwillis on Friday February 06, 2015 @01:15PM (#9010537)
This is true, but they're also all Linux distributions providing exactly the same software, and all duplicating hundreds of hours of effort per package by doing exactly the same thing with tiny incompatible differences. It doesn't have to be that way. For example, they could provide shims for the incompatibilities in each others' standards so the packages edit: spec files could be reused without breaking on other systems. But instead they work in silos. Sigh
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Re:Show HN: Fast native RPM building from any distro, for an... by rwmj on Friday February 06, 2015 @01:19PM (#9010564)
This is a problem (if you consider it a problem) of all Linux distros. It's just that people look at the foo.rpm file and think it should be installable anywhere, but no one would look at a foo.deb file and think they could install it on Arch.
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Re:Show HN: Fast native RPM building from any distro, for an... by peterwwillis on Friday February 06, 2015 @01:33PM (#9010641)
If Debian packages only required a single text file to build everything, they could! It would be simple for the distros to combine their efforts on a single .spec file. Back in the day I used to make RPM .specs that would build the package successfully on Solaris, Linux, Windows, etc and then had tools to convert the RPM into a native package format for easier maintenance. Writing an rpm2dstream script took just a couple hours.
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