Re: Censoring :) (was: Re: anarchism_7.7-1.deb)
On Tue, 28 Sep 1999, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> Exactly. A better designed package manager would support modular package
> format handling. then we could simply do (let's call the package manager
> hpm for now):
>
> hpm -i blacksteel.etheme instead dpkg -i etheme-blacksteel.deb
> hpm -i realvideo.tar.gz instead alien; dpkg
> hpm -i somestuff.rpm instead alien; dpkg
> hpm -i CPAN:mymodule
> hpm -i CTAN:mytexstyle
> hpm -i gutenberg:faust
>
> and so on.
If you make such a tool and people start to use it on a large scale, you'd
better be sure you get the package dependencies right. RPM files have file
dependencies, not package dependencies like DEB files have. TAR files have
no dependencies at all. How are you going to find out which packages a TAR
file depends on (and which versions of those packages)? And how would you
handle conflicts between packages that should be there but aren't?
It is already a problem to install RedHat RPMs on a SuSE system and vice
versa. Please don't encourage people to install RPMs on a Debian system
if they don't know exactly what they are doing. Their systems *will*
break. And they will blame Debian for it.
The idea to install E themes, CPAN modules, CTAN modules etc. this way
seems nice to me, though. Just make sure all files within the themes /
modules are in the right place. And add the right dependencies. For
example, E14 themes should have something like "Depends: enlightenment (>=
0.14), enlightenment (<< 0.15)". Of course, you'd have to detect the
version automatically.
Not to say it's a bad idea, just that it will be a helluva lot of work to
make it work the right way.
Remco
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