Re: OT : Universal Packaging
On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 05:41:30PM +0100, Joris Lambrecht wrote:
> - I'm not a member of the list so please include me in any reply's, can't
> afford yet another storm of mails, allready subscribed to 4 lists -
>
> I've recently had a discussion with someone about the trouble of installing
> packages across systems. Ordinary users often get confused and more
> importantly frustrated.
>
> Now i wonder if future packages would be created using XML and thus
> distributed, the packages would be parsed/processed by some tool at the
> client side wich in turn would convert it to any required package format
> necessary or even simply interpret this for an existing package manager.
>
> Would this be feasable or does there allready exist such a project ?
The "alien" program can already do pretty much that. It can take an rpm,
deb or tgz and convert it to either of the other formats. The main point
you are missing is that the problem doesn't extend from the different
package formats, but from the different policies instilled by each
distribution. It's these internal policies that cause the problems and
hopefully projects such as the FHS will alleviate this.
Ben
--
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/ Ben Collins -- ...on that fantastic voyage... -- Debian GNU/Linux \
` bcollins@debian.org -- bcollins@openldap.org -- bcollins@linux.com '
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