Re: Package System specification
* David Cantrell <david@slackware.com> wrote:
> >to be there are there. Some vendors may also want to rely on open
> >source libraries that aren't spec'ed by the LSB that many
> >distributions *do* ship. They'll want to use them if they are there,
> >and provide them in case they aren't. But the last thing they want
> >to do is overwrite them unnecessarily since that could break things.
> >Have you ever seen the mess that is the world of .dll's in Windows
> >land? Every single game on the planet nicely provides its own
> >DirectX drivers and installs them no matter if you have a newer one
> >or not most of the time, which can break installed things. This is
> >avoidable and we should do it if we have the ability. RPM has that
> >ability.
>
> OK, now all of that sounds nice, but won't work unless you are using an RPM
> system with an RPM database and so forth.
Yes. What is "RPM"? It is a tool, but a tool that only works as expected
if the dependencies work. SuSE and Redhat and whatnot are using RPM. So
can you just install rpms for SuSE on Redhat or vice versa? No, you
can't. The package format is irrelevant, it is a very tiny problem. If
there are no common dependency trees, a common package format doesn't
help much. If there is a common tree, you can savely convert from one
format to the other.
Forget it. Don't specify the package-format in LSB for now. Work on that
issue and specify it when there is a solution, but not now.
The only solution for now is to have vendors supply packages with the
right dependencies for every system they support. Everything else is
trying to make things simpler than they are.
Jochem
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