Re: Package System specification

["Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@MIT.EDU>]

   From: Jochem Huhmann <joh@gmx.net>
   Date: 15 Apr 2000 01:01:31 +0200

   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.

This is a known problem, and we've discussed this already.  It means
that when we specify an LSB RPM, it can only use dependencies which are
defined by the LSB (which will probably be prefixed by lsb-*, or some
such).  It is expected that distributions will have to load some kind of
"LSB compliance" package which will make the proper LSB definitions
expeced by the LSB, and create the appropriate LSB filter libraries, as
necessary.  

It's also important to remember that we don't have to solve the entire
packaging problem.  We need something that works for Quake3, TurboTax,
Oracle, etc.  I.e., third-party applications.  

We don't have to standardize the dependencies necessary to make a glibc
or e2fsprogs packages (i.e., system packages) install cleanly across
different distributions.  That's a harder problem, and we're not trying
to solve it.

						- Ted