Re: [Cooker] idea for MDK 10: rpm packages compatibility

2003-11-11 Thread Götz Waschk
Am Dienstag, 11. November 2003, 07:15:42 Uhr MET, schrieb Keld Jørn Simonsen:
 One thing I would like to see for MDK 10:
 That RedHat, Fedora, SuSE and other rpm packages be
 installabla on MDK systems.
 I dont know what analyses is needed to do that, but it
 is probably something with compatibility libraries.
 Or maybe it is something to do about having packages follow LSB.

Hi,

it's not as easy as you think. All the distributions have different
libraries, different paths, differents configuration systems, package
names, menu systems, ... I have some experience in supporting packages
for several versions of Mandrake which is hard enough, as rpm macros
change and there are bugs you have to work around and so on. 

There's the jpackage.org project which produces Java packages for Red
Hat and Mandrake. They have to do lots of voodoo to make this work,
basically you have to use only the common feature subset of both
distributions or emulate the missing stuff, like the
update-alternatives system. They have only 2 distributions and most of
their stuff is architecture-independant, go figure.

If you want packages to be compatible between more than one
distribution you have to sacrifice features, but where's the benefit?
There's almost everything available for Mandrake, if something's
missing, I or somebody else from this list will add it, unless it's
some closed source commercial stuff you shouldn't use anyway.

CU, Götz
-- 
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the
homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of
totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948), Non-Violence in Peace and War



Re: [Cooker] idea for MDK 10: rpm packages compatibility

2003-11-11 Thread Vedran Ljubovic

The LSB project www.linuxbase.org aims to do exactly
that. This compatibility is what the LSB option during
Mandrake install is for. However it has a very long
way to go.

In order to have these universal RPMs:

- Linux needs to standardise on a certain set of
libraries. LSB has mostly achieved this, but a long
way to go still.
- these libraries need to be forever backward
compatible. Most of the time they are, but from time
to time (cca every 2 years) they go on and break
backward compatibility. When this happens, distros
increase the major version number ie. this happened
between Mandrake 8.2 and 9.0
- they also need to be forever forward compatible ie.
no new features. This will probably never happen.

Meanwhile you just have to understand that rpms are
rarely universal and most of them are distro- and even
distro-version-number specific.

--- Keld Jørn Simonsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 One thing I would like to see for MDK 10:
 That RedHat, Fedora, SuSE and other rpm packages be
 installabla on MDK systems.
 
 I dont know what analyses is needed to do that, but
 it
 is probably something with compatibility libraries.
 
 Or maybe it is something to do about having packages
 follow LSB.
 
 Best regards
 keld
 

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