[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > The LSB packaging cabal has decided that what 3rd party ISV's really > want is the ability to run their own installers on rpm managed > systems.
jeez, you always have to put things in such positive terms, doncha? the LSB packaging people are just responding to what they've been told, which is that there are plenty of people who have reasons why they don't want to use rpm (or deb) for their products. the most common reason is that they deploy something across more platforms than just Linux, and for both support/docu and user experience reasons they want the same installer interfaces across those platforms rather than supporting multiple "OS native" installers. > Since the development roadmap of RPM includes integration of > XAR format, > there is also an opportunity to accomodate LSB at the same time. > > XAR uses XML to represent package metadata. The implementation > in rpm will import the XAR metadata, apply sanity checks, and convert > to the current (and increasingly internal) metadata container > structure known within rpm as a header. > > Using XML (or YAML or any parseable representation) of metadata > as an import/export format is no different than the 3rd party ISV > installer that LSB has set out to solve. > > However, unlike LSB's approach, which AFAICT involves designing > methods in an API that will be exposed and shared by rpm tools > somehow, the approach taken by rpm 5.0 will be entirely data focussed. there's nothing cast in stone on the LSB side; the requirement is a Way to tell the native package manager that some files are placed in certain places, and the npm should be aware of them. An API is one way, but this idea sounds just as usable, maybe more. It's actually more consistent with some other stuff we've kicked round, like having shareable repository information ______________________________________________________________________ RPM Package Manager http://rpm5.org Developer Communication List rpm-devel@rpm5.org
