On Wednesday, January 11, 2012 11:42:08 AM Les Mikesell wrote:
On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 9:15 AM, Lamar Owen lowen@pari.edu wrote:
On Tuesday, January 10, 2012 04:38:27 PM Les Mikesell wrote:
But the hardest part is that these things are application specific and there is no standardization for locations where applications do things. In fact, distributions intentionally move those locations around in their packaging.
Distribution differences are the price we pay for choice.
If the first thing you saw on a unix-like system was the horror of autoconf, would you have taken a second look?
The first thing I saw on a unix-like system was hand-edited Makefiles; I got into this thing before autoconf came into being, a 68k at 10MHz was fast, and 768K of RAM was enough to work with the eight-inch 1.2MB floppies and 5.25 inch full-height 12MB hard drives of the day. Having owned three different unix-like systems of that era, I'm well aware of the difficulties; and all were 680x0 systems, but all different.
This is an even worse situation, because there is no equivalent way to describe what you want across flavors.
Yes, there is, actually. SELinux policies.
How is the application developer (unquestionably the expert on the application needs) supposed to describe those needs to SELinux in a way that can work across distributions without 'less-expert' people guessing about them?
This is a problem that each upstream project will need to work out for themselves.
I guess you are right about the state of the art and that it is as wrong to expect things to work as it was to expect flying cars by now.
I wish I were wrong, honestly, but it is the current state of the art.
But it would have been fun.
No doubt; I'm waiting on my George Jetson air-scooter-in-a-briefcase myself.