On Sun, Sep 10, 2000 at 01:58:45PM -0700, John L . Fjellstad wrote: [snip] > distributions can't start using debs. Heck, every major version of > RPM is incompatible with previous version anyways. Reason I switched is > because the RPM used in 6.x (v3.x) can't read packages for 7 (v4). > Now, I don't know how hard it to change the database, but from what I > understand, both debs and rpms use text based database, so it shouldn't > be impossible. nope, rpm uses a binary database for everything, and a custom fileformat. deb uses a text database (which is trivial to change, and extend, debian has done this many times already with no real break in compatiblity) .debs are also nothing special, just an ar archive of two .tar.gz files. you can extract a .deb on any platform that has ar, tar and gzip. unlike rpm which you need to compile rpm to access a .rpm. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
Attachment:
pgp0UhZ0AgYLD.pgp
Description: PGP signature