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Re: Packaging and installation



Eric S. Raymond (esr@thyrsus.com) wrote:
> Nicholas Petreley <nicholas@petreley.com>:
> > Instead, we should define an installation protocol that
> > looks for programs and libraries within the filesystem
> > itself in order to detect if dependencies are met.
> 
> Nick, I think this is a case where the search for perfection is far less
> important that getting a solution in place that does 90% of the job and
> can evolve to do 100%.

I (as an ex Zenguin guy...:) agree with Eric. We have RPM and it works well 
in most of the cases. A 100% solution is too much of a dream to become 
reality any time soon. And quite frankly I don't know if I'd like to 
have one and only one package format. Competition is good and it drives
technology (see Gnome/KDE... :).

But one point that should be addressed is the use of RPM itself. Different
distributions make very different use of RPM and often it's not compatible to
each other. What ever happened to LANANA as name authority. Standards 
for package names, standards for spec files (i.e. how to handle 
architecture dependent stuff, how to deal with i18n...) could help a lot.
The current LSB version needs to be more elaborate on those issues.
Also how to handle versions and releases is an important issue within RPM
which is still not addressed...

BB
-- 
Bodo Bauer                                      Principal Software Engineer
bb@turbolinux.com                                 http://www.turbolinux.com
Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value
A.E.

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