Probably just another stupid newbie question, and one which serves no real purpose (other than to satisfy my own curiosity): why are so few applications released as compiled binaries?

Some background: I have a heck of a time compiling from source. There's something about my directory structure that most source doesn't seem to like; even when I _know_ that I have all of the required libraries installed, it's the rare app compiled from source that will run on my machine. RPMs are great, of course; but when I can find a Mandrake 9.2-specific RPM for the app I want, it's generally several releases behind current. Yet I've been happily downloading each milestone release of both Firefox and Thunderbird, dumping the tarballs into /home, and running the crap out of them-- because they're ready to go as soon as I unzip them.

I'm woefully unaware of most of the issues surrounding development, compilation, and execution of Linux applications (which is probably obvious just from the nature of this question). But I see so few ready-to-roll binaries, and they're such a convenience for newbs like me-- are there really so many differences amongst various distros (and variations thereof) that it just doesn't make sense for developers to release precompiled binaries? Or is it something else? I realize that part of it is probably because not every app lends itself to being distributed that way, just as I realize that compiling your own gives you maximum flexibility; and even installing an RPM (generally) makes the app available to all users on a system-- but on self-contained, single-user desktop machines like mine, precompiled binaries are killer.

What are the issues I'm missing? I'm not someone who's looking for the "easy way out" here, so I'd appreciate flamelessness-- I've committed to Linux, and as I learn more I'll be doing more for myself. In the meantime, though, precompiled binaries are cool! Please pardon my naivete, but this is something I'm genuinely curious about.

Thanks.

You've answered you're own question. I'm sure you know that the same binary won't work on every computer out there. An example: I write a program in c, and distribute it on a website as source code. One file. I compile it to run on Red Hat based systems and distribute an rpm. And then a .deb for debian systems. By the time i've had a cup of coffee I realise that I now have to host maybe 10 times as much data. And being of limited resources, there is a finite number of distros i can build and test binarys for. Or i could leave the machine specific stuff to someone else.

There is, of course, an answer, roll on Mono......

"What are the issues I'm missing?"

A binary will probably only work on a system using the same version of glibc as the binary was compiled on. There are other less frequently encountered distribution dependencies. So if a developer wants to release a binary he has to compile a separate binary for each distribution. Developers simply pass this responsibility off to the distributions.

One thing that you can do to help the situation is to make binaries available that you had to compile in order to run the program on your distribution so that other people can use them. Then register the web page with Google. I have done this by posting the various rpms that I had to make when I ran Fedora. I also sent word to the developers and some of them put a link on their download site pointing to my Fedora rpms.

http://users.rcn.com/srstites/rpm.we...edora.rpm.html

One of these days I will get around to posting the programs that I had to compile for SuSE 9.1.

So you could help other people out by creating a web page where people can download your Mandrake 9.2 rpms.

___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

In addition to what has already been said - if you're looking to build things from source it's necessary not only to have the runtime library installed but the headers files as well. These usually come in the <packagename>-devel packages. To run apps that use glib2 you need to have the glib2 package installed but to compile a glib2 program from source you need the glibc2-devel package.


Håkan