debmake & dpkg
I have strong reservations about most of Christoph Lameter's
proposals:
> - automatically locate packages when just a packagename is given
> (invoke ftp or whatever means configured to get the package)
>
> - automatically install packages depended on by a package
I think that this is the job of dselect. dselect should have a
`noninteractive' mode where you say:
dselect --install spong
and it finds spong and things it depends on and installs them.
> - some system wide configuration file for how to handle docs /manpages
> 1. Do not install (I am running several low resource systems that
> I wish would not waste resources on manpages and docs)
> 2. Install (uncompressed)
> 3. Install and compress (with as much as possible fixing automatically
> the links etc shifting the debmake functionality to the point of
> installation).
> For that purpose there needs to be some way of telling dpkg what is
> a documentation file and what not. RPM has a similar functionality.
I think that this is best done with pattern-pased file exclusion. I
don't think that conditional compression is necessary.
> - Checksums stored in the .deb package and a function to verify the
> integrity of installed files.
My views on per-file checksums are well-known.
> - Get rid of all the single files in /var/lib/dpkg/info and use
> a database instead to provide faster operation (RPM is much faster
> than dpkg!). Set up a library interface to access the datastructures
> which would be a superset of the rpm library so that rpm tools could
> use the dpkg library (We are hijacking their tools with this move!)
> rpm could run with the dpkg library and install rpm packages without
> conversion ....
This is a very bad idea. dpkg's databases are carefully designed to
avoid bad lossage in case of disk overflow, bad sectors, &c, and to be
manually fixable when required. Typical database solutions do not
have these important properties.
Ian.
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-devel-REQUEST@lists.debian.org . Trouble? e-mail to Bruce@Pixar.com
Reply to: