Change the name of the "ubuntu" builds to "Debian"

[luraktinus]

The "Ubuntu" builds also work on Debian .... would be nice to correct that, else people think that they work on Ubuntu only

[Rachael]

They work on Fedora, too, with a package converter. Or FreeBSD if you extract the packages and install them manually, and install ELF binary support.

Really, there is no need to relabel them - Linux binaries are fairly universal, requiring only the libraries that they were compiled with or higher. Not much different than how Windows works, depending on the tool chains and support libraries that you use.

The reason why they are labeled "Ubuntu" builds is because that's what they were compiled with. Linux is all about experimentation and you just have to play around with it to understand it, really, and if you didn't know it before now you do.

[Matt]

Dang, I didn't even notice that label when I downloaded the blob for AntiX... (it works just fine btw)

[luraktinus]

I don't think that Linux is about experimentation... its just a normal OS like Windows or MacOS and it should be treated like that...

[Rachael]

I disagree there - it's anything but a normal OS but that's what makes it so great.

[Graf Zahl]

... and that attitude by the initiated few is what has kept it back for so many years by now...

[Matt]

Maybe just change it to "Linux (compiled under Ubuntu)"?

(an unsophisticated user on, say, Linux Mint, might not recognize the Debian name, but such a person would probably just gloss over the parenthetical and end up (successfully) trying it because it's the Linux version and they have Linux; a more sophisticated user would probably recognize that the Ubuntu build has a fairly good chance of working on other Debian distros)

[Rachael]

... and that attitude by the initiated few is what has kept it back for so many years by now...

Perhaps, but I would argue that it has more to do with the fear of trying new things and having to relearn something. I tried to get my mom (who is computer literate) to try it once, and she was afraid of precisely that - yet when my stepdad (who is not at all computer literate) lost his hard drive, I had a Linux "live disc" and he was able to do everything he was able to do in Windows without issues - except obviously, play his games since he didn't have a hard drive and many of them didn't support Linux anyhow. (Honestly, I doubt that he even knew he was using Linux) At the time, that was Slackware - one of the distros that's regarded as among the hardest to learn. So really - I think it's just the fear of the unknown that keeps people away from it. (Yes, I know driver support is piss-poor on there, too - but I think that's one of the things that increased popularity will fix over time - to be honest I don't have any systems that Linux doesn't run well on, anyhow, though)

Maybe just change it to "Linux (compiled under Ubuntu)"?

(an unsophisticated user on, say, Linux Mint, might not recognize the Debian name, but such a person would probably just gloss over the parenthetical and end up (successfully) trying it because it's the Linux version and they have Linux; a more sophisticated user would probably recognize that the Ubuntu build has a fairly good chance of working on other Debian distros)

That's something that can definitely be considered, but it comes with it some caveats that may in the long run end up increasing the workload of package maintainers - mainly, being distro-agnostic means that you actually have to support more distros. Just because it works on, say, BackBox, doesn't mean we want to go through the trouble of learning that distro and finding package converters just to support it and troubleshoot for users when things go wrong (and they inevitably do - as they do on any other OS).

I think I should point out that compiling for any Debian based distro does not restrict a binary to Debian, and that seems to be the point of confusion for this whole entire issue. While a .pkg file definitely can only be used on Debian-based distros "out-of-the-box" - you can download package converters for nearly any distro and more often than not, GZDoom will run just fine on them. (Did I mention it works on FreeBSD? That's not even Linux and you can use Linux-compiled programs there just fine)

Nevertheless, I'll talk with _mental_ and Blzut3 and perhaps a few other full-time Linux users to see their opinion about it.

[Marisa the Magician]

I'd just name them by their extension/format. Something like "Linux (.deb)". Then again, since I know very well the formats of packages distros use that might look as straightforward to others as it does to me.

[Rachael]

Yeah, and truthfully I am really not wanting to make Blzut3 convert and upload separate package formats for every distro, so listing by file extension sounds like the best idea. A person can honestly just convert the package to their native format. We could even link to a tutorial that provides instructions on how to do that, as long as we make it clear that we're not officially supporting other distros outside of general Linux knowledge that every Linux user would know anyhow, whether they specifically use said distro or not.

There's too much that is out of our control when it comes to specific distros that we may or may not know or even realize, and the file system layout is definitely somewhat different between the more major ones.

[Blzut3]

I know this thread is a little bit past the "awkward to bump" point, but wanted to make a statement to clarify my intent when I label the packages as Ubuntu instead of Debian which I do for ECWolf, Zandronum, and Doomseeker as well.

While advertising them as Debian packages would likely be fine since I make my packages as universal as reasonably possible, they are ultimately built on Ubuntu 14.04 (I use the oldest still supported LTS). Thus to use the package you need a system that is ABI compatible with Ubuntu 14.04. Since GZDoom uses very few libraries and the libraries that are used are ABI stable this is not a very difficult requirement to meet. In fact it hard not to meet it if your distro was released after April 2014. Ubuntu seems to be better about backwards compatibility than most distros including Debian, so by labeling the downloads as for Ubuntu that reserves the right to ignore ABI break issues if needed.

For example I used to dynamically link to libjpeg, but while Ubuntu provides both libjpeg62 and libjpeg8 to this day Debian's packages kept changing. (I seem to recall getting a report "you need to upgrade to libjpeg8" so I did and then later "libjpeg8 doesn't exist anymore" but I can't prove it. The latter is definitely true, but the former may have just been development version stuff.) When I got the report since Ubuntu is fine I chose to let it be instead of rushing out a package reissue until GZDoom had a new release. I now of course statically link libjpeg to avoid the whole issue.

Another example which affected Zandronum is Ubuntu still has the older libssl ABI available where as Debian does not. I understand that Debian's goal with dropping it is security, but this can be at odds with supporting Ubuntu releases for 5 years. In fact Ubuntu's solution to the libssl ABI was to just patch the newer version of openssl to conform to the old ABI, so they don't even provide libssl1.1 until the upcoming 18.04 release! While this was solvable in my package repo since I can provide additional packages, this is unsolvable in the standalone packages. Short of statically linking openssl, and if there was ever a library where having the OS provide it makes sense it's the ssl libraries. Debian users can of course still run the binaries if they manually install the libssl package from an older release of Debian, compile their own (or even use Ubuntu's package I believe which is a newer version). Since I support all supported versions of Ubuntu, this will be the case until 2021 (or if Canonical decides to break backwards compatibility before 16.04 goes EOL and I need to use a different solution).

One more thing to note: The packages don't have any scripts in them so you don't even need to convert the package on non-deb based distros (unless you really want to). One of the beautiful things about the deb package format is that it's just a tarball inside of an ar archive so you can extract it using standard tools easily obtainable on any distro.

In short, I think the Ubuntu branding provides meaningful information to the user (what ABI needs to be satisfied), so I would encourage keeping it. More bluntly, the goal is if the branding confuses someone then they should be using a flavor of Ubuntu. I do encourage people to run the binary on other distros though, it more than likely will work.