On Mar 02, Erik Troan wrote: > On Fri, 01 Mar 2002 18:41:05 -0700 > "Matt Taggart" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Another thing I've been thinking about is transition to a future lsb package > > format. Does naming packages .lsb make that transition any easier/harder? > > This is Unix (well, almost) folks. Any tool that depends on the extension of > a filename to work properly is simply broken. DOS did this in 1981; it's time > to get over it (yes, I know make and friends are exceptions, but even that is > *default* behavior, not intrinsic to the tool). > > No packaging system for Linux I've ever heard of is filename dependent, > including Slackware's tarballs. Having the lsb mandate a file extension is a > huge step in the wrong direction, IMNSHO. > > RPM provides good magic(5) that lets you find out what kind of package > something is. You do have to open the file and read the first sector, but > that's unavoidable given the above.
Well, perhaps the solution is, as joeyh suggested, to munge the magic in such a way that the package looks like an RPM to RPM (so systems that use RPM as the package manager don't need to provide a separate lsb-rpm, just the lsb package infrastructure), but can be distinguished from a "normal" RPM by tools that need to care about the difference (like alien) without parsing the package dependencies. Chris -- Chris Lawrence <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://www.lordsutch.com/chris/
