Re: Comments: Draft spec and package format/naming
On Mon, 6 Sep 1999, James Dingwall wrote:
> I tried the Debian and Red Hat sites, and the specs for their package formats
> aren't exactly staring you in the face. Just because something is a de facto
> (read RPM) standard doesn't mean that it's best, it is worth examining the
> limitations of .rpm and .deb to see if things can be improved.
Debian and Red Hat have a draft packaging standard floating around which
isn't quite finished. We've been trying to build standard we can both
live with for binary (not source) packages, and have been having reasonable
good success. I think we'll have something worth sharing in another month
or two. RPM and dpkg already use identical (package, epoch, version, release)
semantics (hardly surprising as rpm copied it from dpkg), which has proven
itself quite flexible.
> means that if the new package is broken, I have to reinstall the old package,
> ie have two versions of a package floating around, this is opposed to
> uninstalling the new package. It's no good assuming that you will never get a
> broken package because you will.
It would be trivial to write a quick script that would recreate a package from
an installed system. That would let you backup a package, install a new one,
and restore the old one quite easily.
Erik
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