Re: RH and GNOME
On Tue, 21 Jul 1998, Jules Bean wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Jul 1998, Kysh Dragon wrote:
>
> > > > Plus of course, the little-publicized (outside of Debian) fact that .deb's
> > > > can be extracted on any Un*x system, while .rpm's can't.
> > >
> > > Why can't RPMs? In my discussion on colm about RPM vs. other packaging
> > > formats they pointed out that RPM is cpio which is on all unix platforms
> > > just like ar and tar are. Wow, that was a tongue twister.
> >
> > IIRC, RedHat uses a proprietory (If `Open Source') cpio of their very
> > own.
> >
> > There already IS a unifyed package format.. as standard as they come, and
> > absolutely free of inter-distribution disputes.
> >
> > program.source.tar.gz.
>
> That's not a package format, is it?
Sure it is, although very primitive.
>
> Can I automatically handle dependencies?
>
No...
> Can I easily uninstall or upgrade?
>
Sometimes...
> I'm not saying that .tar.gz's are hard to deal with - I'm sure most of us
> use them all the time. But they're not package formats, by any means.
>
They are the most primitive package format used for the distribution of
source that is commonly in use on many ftp sites. (probably more common
than RPM or deb)
The Debian format is only slightly more complex and you have no trouble
seeing that as a package format. (part of the internals are even tar.gz)
Our current source format is, at its foundation, a tar.gz file plus a
couple of control files.
While I admit that tar.gz is "primitive", it is a way to distribute both
source and binaries that any system can use, sort of ;-)
Luck,
Dwarf
--
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