As I'm sure you know already, I wrote about packaging in a recent column. But I wanted to address a different aspect of it here, in hopes that we'll throw out (IMO the incorrect) idea of declaring RPM as a standard format and instead adopt a more useful, flexible and constructive approach to the problem.
What I propose is to take the now-defunct-Zenguin approach, or at least as close to it as I understand what Zenguin was trying to do. (Pardon me if I've got it wrong.) One of the many problems with declaring RPM as a package format is that it tries to resolve dependencies through the RPM database. So if you install anything that a program needs via any other method besides RPM, then RPM will consider dependencies unresolved even though the programs/libraries a new package needs may actually be present. This makes RPM unnecessarily restrictive and actually counterproductive to compatibility. The answer so far as been "ok, then use alien", but that's not realistic. Alien is far from perfect, and then you're stuck with either switching to RPM (IMO an unacceptable option) or dealing with the problems it causes. Instead, we should define an installation protocol that looks for programs and libraries within the filesystem itself in order to detect if dependencies are met. There are other aspects of the installation protocol we should address, such as how configuration file conflicts are handled. And I'm sure there are several other issues we could address that I won't bother with in this post. The result would be this: If the RPM maintainers want to rewrite RPM to take this into account (even in addition to or in place of searching the RPM database), it would make RPM compliant. I don't know how .deb works behind the scenes, but there's no reason that couldn't be adapted to this protocol, as well. And it would be simple to write an installation utility that uses tgz files and still follows our protocol. -Nick -- ********************************************************** Nicholas Petreley Caldera Systems - LinuxWorld/InfoWorld [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.petreley.com - Eph 6:12 ********************************************************** .
