Packaging and installation

[Lenz Grimmer]

Hi,

On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, Bodo Bauer wrote:

> I (as an ex Zenguin guy...:) agree with Eric. We have RPM and it works
> well in most of the cases. A 100% solution is too much of a dream to
> become reality any time soon. And quite frankly I don't know if I'd
> like to have one and only one package format. Competition is good and
> it drives technology (see Gnome/KDE... :).

Agreed - as long as tools like "alien" exist, this is not the main
problem.

> But one point that should be addressed is the use of RPM itself.
> Different distributions make very different use of RPM and often it's
> not compatible to each other. What ever happened to LANANA as name
> authority. Standards for package names, standards for spec files (i.e.
> how to handle architecture dependent stuff, how to deal with i18n...)
> could help a lot. The current LSB version needs to be more elaborate
> on those issues.

Yes! This is something I was waiting for a long time ago. I always had the
feeling, that LSB is not addressing the most pressing problems first. Most
users today complain about wrong or missing dependencies and different
names for the same package on different distributions. SuSE has finally
come around with using longer names for their packages (no more 8 char
cryptic names) and we would be more than happy to change the package names
to the most common denominator. Is there such a thing as a common package 
namespace?

> Also how to handle versions and releases is an important issue within
> RPM which is still not addressed...

What exactly do you mean here?

	LenZ
-- 
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 Lenz Grimmer                                           SuSE GmbH
 mailto:grimmer at suse.de                       Schanzaeckerstr. 10
 http://www.suse.de/~grimmer/            90443 Nuernberg, Germany
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