Daniel Kreuter wrote: > > I don't agree with you at that point. I always take the tarball from > eclipse.org <http://eclipse.org> (for eclipse) or netbeans.org > <http://netbeans.org> (for netbeans) instead of the one's of > repository provided by the distro. > The reason is quite simple, the one's mentioned above are newer than > the one's in the repos (often, not always but everywhere i looked for > it, it was so) > > But there may be people who will first look in rpmdrake or urpmi > that's right, but not everybody.
Well, I didn't say *everybody*, I was referring to newer users who might actually do what we tell them to :-) The problem is that there is a very high probability that anyone who installs from an RPM will then install plugins directly. Given that, I would question even packaging the base product as an RPM. Then again, there's the concern about whether an RPM-provided package may provide something a tarball does not, or vice-versa. For example, the MDV Java RPMs play all sorts of games with /etc/alternatives and don't (I think) set environment variables like JAVA_HOME. This means that tarball installs of things like Ant need manual tweaking to work correctly with an RPM-based JDK. The RPM-based Ant has wrapper scripts which depend on the /etc/alternatives stuff and determine JAVA_HOME on the fly.
