Re: [Hampshire] Re:Application installers

On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:24:33 +0000
"James Courtier-Dutton" <james.dutton@???> wrote:

> Ah! I was not aware that you were talking about a binary only
> distribution with some sort of license key. You are pretty much on
> your own in that case and have to deal with all the different
> distributions yourself. Not a pleasant job!
> With normal GPL/BSD open source, one simply creates an upstream
> source code release, and all the distros do all the packaging for
> you.

I can't remember how Opera originally released its browser but I
doubt it was via a source code release.

It was & is possible to download the package in many formats,
including debs & rpms for lots of distros plus a tar.gz bundle. Opera
also allows for using 'native' or static QT libs so they seem to have
overcome the problem of having to 'cover' the multitude of Linux
versions.

I realise Opera probably has a lot more resources than MPEForth so
you need to get distro maintainers working for you ;-)

Opera is now available in a Debian repo with a Debian maintainer so
keeping it up-to-date is now much simpler, (eg: the latest version
was downloaded overnight via cron-apt and available for me to install
with aptitude safe-upgrade this morning)

--
John Lewis
Debian (Sid) & the GeneWeb genealogical data server