Re: Packaging system improvements
On Sun, 6 Jul 1997, Tom Lees wrote:
> 1. We need to add a "Keywords: ..." line to the control file for each
> package. However, the success of this depends more on the keywords
> individual maintainers put in their packages keyword lists than the
> presence of special features for it.
What for?
> 2. We need a way of including and excluding specific directories from
> the install of a package, or moving them. This will be dealt with
> by deity, but the main "dpkg" program should also be capable of
> handling this.
I thought the idea was to provide a libdpkg and have both deity and dpkg
use that, so any features would be available to both and to any other user
interfaces anyone might want to make?
> 3a. We need to standardize on a location where Debianized sources
> installed on a system should be put, and the format of this tree.
So long as it is still easy to install sources in an arbitrary location.
> 3e. We need a method of building packages as a non-root user.
If fakeroot does what it should, it looks like being the neatest solution
to that and wouldn't need any changes to anything.
> 5. We need to speed up the initial reading of the files when dpkg is
> invoked. The reason for this slowness is that in
> /var/lib/dpkg/info, there are a great many (580 on my system)
> files, and a large amount of these are read upon startup (*.list,
> *.conffiles) of dpkg (244 on my system). This can be done using a
> libdb database, and stat'ing the /var/lib/dpkg/info files on
> startup.
Yes, that would be a big improvement.
> 9. Currently, we have a problem with the architecture field as used by
> dpkg. It assumes that the architecture is Linux. This means that
> there is a fairly poor portability to other Operating Systems. For
> example, "mbr" is a generic i386 package, but most are Linux-specific.
No it isn't, it's a generic PC BIOS package. There could be other i386
based systems that booted differently.
> For deity, I have been developing a system which allows transparent
> access to the user interface to ask questions of the user,
> etc.
Will they still work if people don't use deity but instead install
directly using dpkg?
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