Packages go one further by including a single multi architecture binary.  Of course the only thing more fun than compiling something is to say compile it four times.  “-arch i386 -arch sparc -arch hppa -arch m68k” but now you had a binary that could run on all the NeXT platforms, instead of having 4 separate files....

Although I think today it’s largely x86_64 & ARM.  But I’m sure there is some holdouts with MIPS/PowerPC/S390/Sparc/Sparc64 etc.

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Michael Kjörling
Sent: Thursday, 23 February 2017 6:12 PM
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Mach for i386 / Mt Xinu or other

On 22 Feb 2017 16:57 +0800, from jsteve@superglobalmegacorp.com:

> My personal catastrophic issues with Linux has always been

> the ‘hookers and blackjack’ approach, where someone doesn’t like

> LIBC then they’ll just replace it, over and over and over. Then you

> get binary commercial products (Oracle) which are a nightmare to

> deal with, and now you end up with containers as a way to deal with

> the horrible impossibility of deploying binaries to Linux. I’m still

> hopeful someone will just “borrow” what NeXT did with packages, and

> fat binaries.

Something like _snaps_, which Ubuntu is apparently pushing in their

most recent releases?

What is a snap? https://snapcraft.io/docs/snaps/intro

Can a vanilla Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Server run without snapd?

https://askubuntu.com/q/878431/11751

--

Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael@kjorling.se

                 “People who think they know everything really annoy

                 those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)