[lug] library naming conventions, sym links

[D. Stimits]

...
> As MST said, "Let many flowers blossom." But some blossoms are more pleasing
> than others, so maybe its time to switch distributions. I think I understand
> your desire to learn how to package software in a way that is, for certain,
> syntatically correct, but maybe the infrastructure just isn't there in this
> flower.

I got a chuckle out of that :P

Fedora is too popular, and it's what I know well. Other distros have 
also left me feeling that they lack something. When it comes to 
development though, I think developing for fedora/redhat works out best. 
I certainly can't afford to buy SuSE, Mandriva isn't popular enough and 
is less oriented to developers, and Debian just doesn't keep up well 
enough. Ubuntu seems to work to solve some of the Debian problems, but 
it isn't popular enough as a development target. Gentoo is a bit of a 
specialty distro in my eyes, and I doubt specializing in Gentoo is very 
useful. Someone might tell me to write my own distro then, but how 
popular would that be if a goal is to write software that gets used?

Then again, there are so many packaging solutions, that this is in 
itself what I see as the real problem. There is no unified packaging 
language, and no unified package dependency system. There have been some 
frontends that offer partial solutions, for example yum is nice, and I 
hear the debian package system is actually more flexible than rpm in 
many regards. The linux filesystem hierarchy standards have helped, at 
least in installation, but provide nothing for packaging systems. The 
day all of the major distros come up with a quality, unified packaging 
scheme, I suspect that Linux will start growing in ways it could not before.

D. Stimits, stimits AT comcast DOT net