On Wed, Jul 22, 1998 at 11:24:51AM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote: > > I fear the LSB is going to mandate the use of rpm (the program) to help > > those poor ISVs of the world. If they are not going to use the "no > > standard package format, just functionality+translators" approach, I wish > > at least they choose to define the package format only, and let us use > > whichever tool we like best to build/install/manage it. > > The LSB will mandate only the package format. I argued against such a > mandate, and actually had one other person agree with me, but we were > voted down by the Red Hat majority on the committee. While the format will > most likely be a "modified" RPM, we will have no problems with this as we > already have alien. I would have initially voted with you. However over the course of the thread on base-eng (afaik mortals cannot subscribe, so I was just reading archives) I changed my opinion. It truly does not matter what format the packages are in. It absolutely does not. As long as the package format doesn't have the branding of a distribution other than itself. .lsp or something is acceptable. .rpm or .deb is not. Both rpm and dpkg can (and should) be altered to use the resulting format and I would go so far as to suggest that that we and they consider converting our distribution to the new format package by package. Maybe over time, maybe all at once. Now my next crushing blow: rpm is not up to the task of LSB. However, dpkg isn't either. dpkg could be extended easily to handle the changes and the .deb files are able to expand to meet the changes without ANY changes to structure. But then, so could a standard gnu cpio next version of .rpm file. If LSB gets a package format, dammit it better be a good one. > It is my position that it is far more important that the LSB mandate > library .so nameing conventions, and the names and places of the standard > components of a system, than that it declare a package format. We will > just have to wait and see... That too.
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