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Say what you mean and mean what you say
by not me on Wednesday 11/Apr/2001, @22:07
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>What amazes me about your last post is not how well you criticized what I've said - which you didn't do at all, IMO - but rather, how well you've criticized things I *didn't* say.
I'm sorry, I misconstrued your statement that "Underthumb is, without a doubt, 100% correct" as indicating that you actually agreed with what he said and were going to back up his argument. You were both apparently arguing that KDE should take on the full responsibility of providing binaries itself. You made no mention of your scheme for KDE to provide a single "official" set of portable binaries.
Now that you have, in fact, revealed your scheme in all its glory, I can respond to your actual argument. (by the way, why didn't you just say what you meant in the beginning?)
First of all, I agree that of course the developers are the ones who are best suited to compile KDE (although they are not best suited to adapting to the quirks of each and every distribution, which you seem to agree with).
However, I think your idea of providing a "single, statically linked binary" is not feasable for other reasons.
Here's the problem: KDE is not a single binary (not even close), so how do you propose to make a single statically linked binary out of it? Statically link every component, you say? My God, that's bloatware extreme! KDE memory usage would skyrocket! Only people with _over_ 256 MB of RAM would even be able to _think_ about running a statically linked KDE. A KDE with every component statically linked against QT would be impossible to run. Include QT as a shared library and statically link the rest, you say? Still extreme bloatware. The KDE project would _not_ be doing itself or anyone else a service by providing unusable binaries.
Besides, the utterly gigantic tar.gz file would be out of the reach of all but the most persistent modem downloaders.
These statically linked binaries would appeal only to a very small audience: Those people who have broadband connections to the Internet and also have truckloads of RAM that they don't mind wasting for no reason. Anyone else who tried these binaries would be repulsed by their large size and insane memory usage, and they would probably think of KDE as bloated and slow from then on.
This distribution method works well for Opera, and I think its a great idea in their case. The difference is that Opera is one small binary. KDE is much larger, and is composed of many smaller binaries. This makes static linking impractical.
What really should happen is changes should be made in the GNU environment to facilitate moving binaries around much like Windows does. However, the focus of the GNU project has never been and never will be portable binaries, so it is unlikely that this will happen. |
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