On Wed, 18 May 2005 10:05:34 -0700, Dan Kegel wrote: > No hacks needed; you just have to embrace reality.
The reality is that 95% of computers run Windows which is very good at supporting developers who distribute binaries in this way. On Linux there's all kinds of gotchas you just Have To Know which is silly and unproductive - worse, people only find out about this stuff _after_ they get burned by it. In the last few months I have been working with one commercial game developer who actually did a Linux port but wasn't ever planning on releasing it - it was done as a half-way stopping point to a MacOS X port. Having done the work, why didn't they want to release it? Because they'd heard from other people in the industry what a nightmare supporting Linux was, and how ropey its binary compatibility is. They didn't want the support costs. Linux has this reputation amongst those people entirely because things like this are non-intuitive and poorly documented. So developers find out by dealing with tech support requests, and they then tell their friends not to bother. Hopefully we can get this game released, but we'll have to wait and see. Anyway, the point is I disagree that this policy is harmless or "just the way it is". Linux is by far in the minority in lacking this feature. We might as well accept _that_ reality. thanks -mike
