Re: LSB

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

On Sun, 1 Jul 2001, Wichert Akkerman wrote:

> Previously Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > No way that rpm replaces dpkg; dpkg is doing a far better job in defining
> > dependencies, which is IMHO the first and most important job of a package
> > management system.
> 
> That's actually not true. dpkg and rpm do not define dependencies, they
> allow packages to specify them. The difference is that Debian has very
> good and strict policies on how to use those dependencies and other
> distributions do not.

I didn't mean that; rpm has "Depends". End of story.
the .deb format allows for a lot more relationships between packages,
which makes it far better. Whether or not there is a policy does not
change anything in this; if RedHat would have a good policy, they're still
stuck with bad dependencies...

My favourite example is something I experienced: I once bought myself a
soundcard, a simple 16 bit ISA SoundBlaster. So, I installed RH's
"soundconfig" tool, which depended on "awetools" (or whatever that
package's name was). I liked soundconfig at the time, but disliked the
fact that I *had* to install awetools to configure my soundcard in a "user
friendly" way. whatever that was ;-)

In Debian, policy or not, soundconfig would recommend awetools. If I
insisted, I would be able to uninstall awetools without having the
packaging system going nuts about it.

Not that I would; I'd just "apt-get --purge remove soundconfig" now ;-)

-- 
wouter dot verhelst at advalvas in belgium

Try does not exist. Believe that you will do it, else you will fail.

       -- Luke Skywalker,
       in the trilogy "The Jedi Academy", Kevin J. Anderson