Re: Supported Linux Versions

Hi,

I have a customer that would like us to stop using source RPMs for distribution. He says that many Linux distributions do not support SRPMS. Does anyone know which distributions do NOT support SRPMS?

Personally I do back flips of joy whenever I get srpms from a vendor. At least if its poorly crafted I can quickly identify the problems and provide the correct feedback to the vendor. For ease of use I do appreciate also having the binary rpms avalible.

Also, I distribute a carefully crafted RPM that supports SUSE 9.2, 9.3, 10, SLED 10, openSuse 10.2, RHEL3, RHEL4, RHEL5, FC4, FC5, and FC6. Is this the typical way to distribute software on Linux? Should I also release a tarball? Or use some other method? Comments?

All of the distributions you named support srpms. If you also distribute the binary rpms debian based systems will be able to use alien to convert your rpms to debs. You'll notice that most projects will provide binary rpms compiled on the various distributions they support and the srpm that produces them, as well as the tarball rpm uses during the build process.

Russell