Installation of BricsCad on various Linux distributions
I tried installing the 10.3.6 alpha version on a Mandriva 2008.0 distro. BricsCad needs many libraries (*.so files), but some libraries (libgio2.0 , libglib2, etc) BricsCad was compiled with are newer than on my machine. This means I must upgrade to a newer distro as these new libraries cannot be found for my MDV2008. So my questions:
What distro do you use to develop BricsCad ?
Do you realize that some people may want to run BricsCad on older (say 2 years) distro's ?
Which distro's are you planning to produce packages for ?
Regards,
Paul Westerveld
Comments
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Hi Paul,
The question is, is your 2008.0 still supported by Mandriva? It is not clear to me looking at this lifecycle table. Base updates (whatever that means) for 2008 stopped April 9th of 2009, with an 18 months extended period for Enterprise Desktops ending Oct. 9 of this year. Mandriva has released 4 successive versions since. For that reason, I suspect the final Bricscad For Linux version won't support your distro.
Don't forget this is still an alpha version we are talking about, that they are probably developping on a recent distro. Its purpose is for us to test it, but most of all to placate their Linux customers by showing them they are working on it! If you want to take a look at the alpha, and don't want to upgrade your desktop (which I can understand if it is your production machine), maybe a solution would be to install Sun's VirtualBox (which is free for personal and evaluation use), and create some recent distro virtual machine in which to install Bricscad in. Or maybe (I have no idea if it would work) just download a Mandriva LiveCD, boot from it and run Bricscad from there. You just need read/write access from the drive on which you extracted it.
But you bring an important point that I'm sure Bricsys is already pondering on: they have to decide what they are going to support, and sooner or later they'll have to break the news. It would be nice if they discussed it here, though I'm pretty sure they'll prefer to wait at least till the Beta to announce it, and more probably they'll annonce only at the final release.
This is not simple, with most GNU/Linux distros having relatively short support cycles, even those dubbed "long term support". They may supply security updates for existing packages, but those won't be upgraded. I don't know how Mandriva works, but on Ubuntu for example, Thunderbird 3 was released shortly after Ubuntu 9.10, but we're stuck with 2.0 nonetheless (with updates) till the next Ubuntu version is released, that is unless you're willing to install it manually by downloading it from Mozilla's. BTW I wonder if it's possible to do the same with the libraires you mention.
On one hand, for Bricsys to support 2 years+ old distros might be a nightmare. On the other hand for potential corporate customers to keep their desktops up to date with 12 to 18-month cycles must be too. And which kind of distro do they choose to support? Personal desktop releases, or only corporate ones like Red Hat or SuSE Linux Enterprise? What about Solaris? They also must consider those customers that are individuals who may be upgrading their desktops more frequently. I wonder where the bulk of Bricsys' customer base is. Indeed, it is much simpler in the Windows world, where XP was the only release from Microsoft for 6 years.
Sorry for my ramblings, but I thought your thread would be a good place to make all of our opinions/concerns known to Bricsys. I hope you don't mind, but if you do, I apologize.
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Normand,
I don't mind at all. You're right all the way. What I wanted to point out is that probably many users will want to "post-install" BricsCad on production machines which will not be upgraded to newer distro's just to facilitate BricsCad. I at least wish to do that. I realise that support on many (older) distro's will be difficult, but in my opinion it would not be a good approach to launch a version that only runs on the latest Linux distro's. Maybe the developers could compile their finel production version against, say, 1 year old libraries. This would make things upward compatible.
By the way: We still have many machines which run on tweaked versions of the original RedHat 7.2 with 2.4 kernels ! But we don't want to run BricsCad on them...
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