Re: .rpm? .lsb??

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@transmeta.com>]

Raul Miller wrote:
> 
> I find it odd that the lsb spec includes something which I thought was
> declared explicitly outside its scope: packaging.
> 
> I thought the idea was that distributions would provide their own value
> add, that LSB was supposed to document the common facilities which
> should be present in a linux system -- primarily so that commercial
> vendors could deploy linux software for a variety of distributions.
> 
> Proposal:  specify that an lsb system be able to install a .tgz file
> and register it in its package database.  The package represented by
> the .tgz file should not install if the file provides a file which is
> already present on the system.  The package name under which the contents
> are registered should be some prefix of the .tgz file name.
> 

Quite frankly, .tgz isn't good enough for just about anything.  If the
goal is to be binary compatibility, there needs to be a standard package
distribution format, and like it or not, RPM has become the de facto
standard, and I think it is best making it a de jure standard with
proper specification.  Specifically, I think LSB should standardize the
package format for a *specific* version of RPM -- perhaps with
extensions to make it more multivendor friendly -- since RPM has had far
too many forwards compatibilty problems in the past.

That doesn't mean that distributions need to use RPM, it just means they
should be able to handle third-party RPM/LSB packages.

	-hpa