Re: FatELF patches...

From: Chris Adams
Date: Mon Nov 02 2009 - 11:21:01 EST


Once upon a time, Ryan C. Gordon <icculus@xxxxxxxxxxx> said:
>I wouldn't imagine this is the target audience for FatELF. For embedded
>devices, just use the same ELF files you've always used.

What _is_ the target audience?

As I see it, there are three main groups of Linux consumers:

- embedded: No interest in this; adds significant bloat, generally
embedded systems don't allow random binaries anyway

- enterprise distributions (e.g. Red Hat, SuSE): They have specific
supported architectures, with partner programs to support those archs.
If something is supported, they can support all archs with
arch-specific binaries.

- community distributions (e.g. Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian): This would
greatly increase build infrastructure complexity, mirror disk space,
and download bandwidth, and (from a user perspective) slow down update
downloads significantly.

If you don't have buy-in from at least a large majority of one of these
segments, this is a big waste. If none of the above support it, it will
not be used by any binary-only software distributors.

Is any major distribution (enterprise or community) going to use this?
If not, kill it now.

--
Chris Adams <cmadams@xxxxxxxxxx>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.
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