On 5/14/2010 8:51 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > >>> Right, a document viewer, that lets you fill some stuff in once in a >>> while. That's only, oh, 8 times the size of firefox.... >>> >>> Hmm, I wonder if it's actually a semi-stripped version of Adobe, with >>> most of the features disabled.... >> >> When someone can convince all the Linux distributions to ship compatible >> shared libraries you might start to see convenient binaries to run on >> them. But not before. > > Sorry, to me that's a nonsequitur to what I wrote. I'm thinking it's all > there, but they have a key in, or not in, that keeps it from doing more. > Libraries? Isn't that LSB? No, LSB 'should' define a standard set of libraries and their locations, but it's actually just a committee that meets once in a while and decides to move things around arbitrarily without providing enough of standard to make a program run. So, every distribution has to have it's own repositories with every program rebuilt uniquely for that distribution instead of being able to share this work and anyone distributing binaries that they'd like to run on more than a tiny fraction of linux boxes has to statically link copies of the libraries they need which not only bloats the download size but also wastes RAM at runtime and requires complete program replacement for every little library update. I'm amazed that companies like Adobe and VMware bother with that kind of crap at all. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com