Re: RPM

[Perry Piplani <netserve@bayou.org>]

On Sun, 30 Mar 1997, Gith wrote:

> 
> >From Redhat's blurb about their new Maximum RPM book.
>             RPM currently runs on Linux, IRIX, Solaris, SunOS, AIX,
>             HP/UX, AmigaOS, and FreeBSD, and is quickly becoming the
>             de-facto packaging standard for free software on the
>             Internet.
>

Oh really? De-facto standard? This type of bloated marketing claim reminds
of another very popular commerial software company that makes operating
systems for PC's. And the fact that Redhat often reminds me of them is one
of the reasons I choose not to use Redhat 

> I have to say up front that I don't like RPM. I'd like to hear
> more about the direction DPKG is going in. All this RPM talk is
> giving me a complex.
> 

Sure, you can port dpkg or RPM to another Unix. Shouldn't be that hard.
But different unixes have different directory structures and require
different binaries. So you gotta get people to start making packages in
that format for that particular system. 

Redhat my have ported RPM to other platforms but I don't see any
of the free software distributed over the Internet for various Unixes in
RPM format. It's all in tarballs as usual. Most commercial Unixes have
their own packing systems anyways.

Dpkg can swallow redhat RPM's via the alien feature. So even in the
unlikely event that the entire planet were to convert to RPM, we can still
use dpkg!


Time flies like arrows, but fruit flies like bananas

Perry Piplani                http://perrypip.netservers.com
perry@perrypip.com           http://www.netservers.com