On Sat, May 23, 1998 at 12:14:34AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote: > >The "other data" in Debian's case is stuff like dependency information, > >installation and removal scripts, and the maintainer's contact address. > > Proprietary to Debian... The .deb is proprietary to Debian. =p The installation and removal scripts are important even if you can't use them as-is, see below. > >(That's more or less enough information to tell you what other programs > >you need to already have installed, anything special that you might have > >to take care of beyond just untar'ing it, and someone to email if you > >run into problems) > > Which is generally in the README. The README file covers tarball installation. Unlike srpms, Debian's source packages are the tarball, a debianizing .diff, and a .dsc file to help dpkg-source use the above two files. The contents of the .deb file are debianized and should be instaled pretty much according to the preinst/postinst.. The prerm/postrm is just a handy thing if you ever wanna get rid of the program. Debian pre/postwhatever files do assume that they can use anything in base, which includes dpkg. They can and will try to update-alternatives, menus, what have you, and that will need to be changed. That stuff is usually non-essential and can be edited out of the install scripts quickly. If you have any questions as to how to remove the debianisms from the script, that maintainer email is suddenly very handy, if still proprietary to Debian. > >Most of that's usually duplicated in /usr/doc/ directories, but since it's > >there and it can be useful, I think it's a good thing to let it be got at. > > To the point of requiring another program to get at the archive that the > people want? I don't think so. > > Here is why a lot of people are looking at SLP and liking it. > > tar xzf blah.slp > > There ya go, that's it, end of story. No cpio, no ar, nothing but tar > which has been the standard for years and years, esp. in the Linux community > as a whole. SLP is an extention of that standard. Since it is compatible > with it one can, theoretically, replace TGZ with SLP. The same cannot be > said about deb and rpm. Do you remember a release of bash that made it in to unstable not long ago? It had a predepends on libreadline---but the wrong version. Oops. Those of us who had another working sh-type shell had no problems fixing it, but what's the first thing more than a few of us did with it? We made quick non-maintainer patches to the .deb so it would install properly. I don't know about others, but I didn't pull out dpkg-dev stuff. I just un-ar'd it, un-tar'd control.tar.gz, and I fixed the dependancy info. Put it back together and it installs right. In the same circumstances, would I have been able to do that with a slp file? Likely not. Probably not.
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