First of all: please use a standard textwidth of at most 76. Right now your mail frankly looks horrible. Only due to vim's awesome reformating power is sending a reply doable :) Previously fantumn Steven Baker" wrote: > Package Naming Scheme > ----------------------- > The current naming scheme of many packages is a mess, to say the > leasy. This, of course applies almost exclusively applies to > libraries, but there are some other packages that could use some help > (Electric Eyes, and Easy Editor come to mind). Reading forward I never see why those two are mentioned here.. > The problem is inconsistency. Some package names, speaking about > libraries here, are prefixed with the word 'lib', as in libgtk, and > some are not, as in Imlib. Generally speaking all libraries are prefixed with `lib' and include their soname. This isn't policy, although it might be a nice addition. > My solution, after long thought and working out, is to simply modify > the Debian Package Management system to allow multiple versions of > packages to be installed. I really dislike this approach. Having multiple version of a package makes very little sense, but any discussion depends on how you define a package. Are libc5 and libc6 the same package, since both implement the standard C library and runtime-code, or are they different packages since they different packages since they are completely (binary in this case) incompatible? This is where RH and Debian seem to differ: for RH they become the same package, and you need multiple versions of the same package to support all applications. This is probably why they need hacks like dependencies on files to get this working. For Debian we use different packages, which makes the process much more transparent. We seperate the packages by (again, using libraries as an example) adding the soname of the library to the packagename, which explains the occasionally weird-looking packagenames. > Another feature that I would like to see implemented, is something > that would check all dependencies for dead libraries "ie, libraries > that aren't used", perhaps this would be done by a program seperate > to dpkg. This should definitely not be in dpkg, but in a frontend such as apt or dselect. Wichert. -- ============================================================================== This combination of bytes forms a message written to you by Wichert Akkerman. E-Mail: wakkerma@cs.leidenuniv.nl WWW: http://www.wi.leidenuniv.nl/~wichert/
Attachment:
pgpzSxPwjdymv.pgp
Description: PGP signature