Re: new package format

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no>]

]] Eugene Gorodinsky 

| I also think some abstraction from the actual filesystem is a good
| idea. For example currently the only way to install a lib in a
| directory other than the one it was intended for is by using a hack
| that would look at the directory of a file and move it somewhere. It
| seems that with the current situation where you want to use
| /lib/i386-linux-gnu tuples instead of the approach used before, would
| be less painful if the current package format had some abstraction
| from the filesystem. Since the programs don't usually care where the
| library is, as long as it is in the LDD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Except that this doesn't work particularly well.  Libraries embed
paths, and detecting when they do is painful.

[...]

| Currently debian policy is to have a .desktop file for each GUI
| program. What would be better, IMHO, is having some sort of
| abstraction, so that the package manager itself would create a
| .desktop file entry, given an icon and some information about the
| package.

like, the path, the description, translated into multiple languages and
so on?  This is just .desktop files reinvented.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are