On Thu, 27 Mar 2003, Jeff Waugh wrote: > <quote who="Mike MacCana"> > > > Of course, the ability of those packages to integrate with the rest of the > > system is fairly limited if they're turned into dumb archives by a program > > such as alien, which, when run on an rpm based system, will turn rpm into > > effectively dumb archives in dpkg format - having no dependency > > information whatsoever and removing the purpose of having a packaging > > system in the first place. > > LSB packages are not designed to completely integrate regardless of the > native OS packaging system. Think about it - SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat, they > all use RPM as their package format, but their packages are all alarmingly > different.
> The LSB *must* define a format for packages that work across LSB-compliant > operating environments, but it *cannot* define how they integrate. It would > be a far more intrusive standard if it attempted to do that. It would be a far more effective standard if they did that. Standard namign conventions for packages is a simple matter of p[olicy and easily decided. Choosing a standard packaging format to record this information is a logical first step to making Linux an Operating system. Not a hundred and fifty of them. > So, regardless of the native packaging format, LSB packages will islands. :) If you meant *are* islands, then yes. But that's nto a desirable situation. > Again, it is a subtle difference, but a crucial one. If you don't understand > it fully, I do. You just don't seem to be listening to what I'm saying. This isn't a matter of > try shipping a few LSB packages across LSB-compliant OSes: They > end up as useful as tarballs with metadata, which provides far less than the > full capabilities provided by RPM packages designed for a particular > platform. You'd get library dependencies, standard installation / uninstallation, file verification, upgrades, and a bunch of other stuff - excepting package dependencies which the LSB does not *yet* deal with. A good start though. What you don't understand is that I don't find the situation you've described as desirable: no system administrator would. Dependencies are part of the Linux and its both possible and reasonable for the LSB to do so. But one step at a time. > This really has nothing to do with the RPM format, the deb format, dpkg, rpm > or particular distributions. It's not a religious issue. Indeed. It is a matter of being able to package and track thousands of applications that will over time be written not for $RANDOMDISTROOFTHEMONTH but for Linux as a Real Grown Up OS - aka, the LSB. Mike -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
