Re: .rpm? .lsb??

[Jim Knoble <jmknoble@pobox.com>]

På 1999-Sep-26 klokka 18:04:23 -0400 skrivet Raul Miller:

: 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.

The only way that commercial vendors can sanely deploy linux software
and applications is with a standardized packaging format.  Having to
support different packaging formats is just as bad for vendors as
having to support different C libraries, file locations, etc.

: 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.

Yuck.  As H. Peter Anvin mentioned, distributing software packages as
tarballs has quite a few limitations.  The RPM package format and
installation method deals with these limitations nicely.  For example,
your note above about file conflicts is a rather primitive way of
dealing with conflicts between packages; RPM provides methods of
circumventing file conflicts and dealing with special kinds of files
(such as configuration files).  Tarballs also don't carry any
information about what other packages, libraries, etc. their contents
depends on.  RPM handles that nicely, both for the packager and the
installer/uninstaller.  Tarballs are also notoriously difficult to
properly uninstall.  Et cetera.

--jim

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