[TUHS] Re: [OT?] 1993 'Sourceware' paper anniversary. What was right & any surprises?

I agree. The differences between desktop/server Linux distributions are largely invisible to application code. THe most obvious exceptions are locations for files. I’ve found it’s basically easier to deal with that dynamically (in the application code), rather than doing an autoconf-based distro switch. Init script vs. units, etc, are minor issues too. Sometimes I’ve found a particular platform doesn’t have a package for eg. the right SSL library, or the right version of something, but that’s fairly rare, and mostly able to be worked around by being conservative in dependency choices. Alpine’s use of musl rather than glibc was a bigger problem, but musl is increasingly glibc compatible. Other libc versions used by embedded platforms, create more problems, but then those applications tend to be fairly narrowly targeted anyway. But all that said … it’s a heap easier than making source code compile across every common Unix in the mid-to-late 90’s. d