On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 10:40, Nick Rout wrote: > Jim Cheetham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > And the other points you make are true, but don't move me. tar has > > become the canonical distribution archive, so proficiency with tar is
> There is no standard for packages in the linux world, but there are a > few that vie for that accolade, and rpm must be one of them. Bzzzzt. No Feeding The Troll. There is a canonical standard for software distribution in the *unix* world, and that's a tarball of the source files. I think you're trolling with RPM ... I haven't touched an RPM file for well over 5 years. Linux is not the only Unix ... and of the set of Linux distributions, "only" RedHat-based systems cling to RPM. On a daily basis, I use FreeBSD, Debian & Mac OS X. None of these use RPM by choice. > (and rpm's perceived problems have nothing to do with cpio, and are > largely fixed by putting a layer above it - apt or urpmi for example. > just the same as dpkg is improved by apt) The layer that they need is a "single source" of inter-dependancy management, like FreeBSD's ports tree, or Debian's distributions. What they've historically had is multiple independant RPM-producers *per package*, scattering them all over the net and having no interest in supporting end-users configs. I suspect that Mandrake are getting good at this aspect, judging by others' comments. -jim
