Re: LSB bastards
On Sun, 1 Jul 2001, Joey Hess wrote:
> > Debian will probably never comply with the spec as it is written. We will
> > be lucky if alien gets us enough compliance for the real-world
> > situations..
>
> As I read the spec, alien is sufficient for complience with their
> package format requirements.
But the resulting .deb when used with dpkg will be non-conformant at
least.. Aside from the standard troubles with .rpm conversions (file
depends! Ick!) the version comparison function is different, we don't do
versioned provides, our semantics for dependencies on virtual packages are
different, we have different installation order rules, etc. Heck, as
specified by the LSB the rpm 'lets install foo 1.0 *AND* foo 1.1 at the
same time' trick is supported - we don't do that either.
Some can be fixed without too much trouble, others are a huge undertaking
(the version problem) and some I never want to see us support (file
depends, the multiversioning thing).
I think the best we can hope for is that alien works well enough in
practice and hope nobody tries the things we won't support. :|
The amusing thing is that in some respects RPM 4 is non-compliant too.
It's just a really particularly stupid specification.
> see why we can't easily make a package that makes the system it's
> installed on LSB compliant, in the real world even.
Well, I expect we can achieve most of the non-packaging requirements
fairly easially..
Jason
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