Good enough

[Nicholas Petreley]

* Erik Troan (ewt at redhat.com) [001024 13:00]:
>
> Versions matter. The filesystem does not contain versioning information,
> and you're dead w/o it. You can ignore versioning as long as you like but
> this problem won't go away.
> 

I don't understand what you mean.  Why can't you look for
specific versions of libraries based on a file naming
convention?  

If you're talking about applications, that definitely is a
problem, but it is not an insoluble one, IMO.  Since we
would be defining the procedure with which to install
applications, we simply need to add a stop to deposit
version information into a database according to a
naming convention that we define.  

If LSB wants to standardize on the RPM database for that
purpose, fine.  I have no problem with that, as long as we
make the information generic enough so that it doesn't tell
the installation program "You need this other RPM file to
resolve the dependency".  That's the whole problem with
RPM.  What the installation program really needs to find in
the database is something more like "You have Apache 2.x.x
installed" or "You need to have Apache 2.x.x installed but
it isn't here".  Not "You need apache-2.x.x-i386.rpm"

If that generic info is already in the RPM database, great
- let's define some naming standards on so that everyone
can expect to understand the information already in the
database.  That way other installation methods can use that
information to resolve dependencies regardless of the
package format. 

But note that this database version information would be IN
ADDITION TO the search through the actual system - not a
replacement for it.  

-Nick


-- 
**********************************************************
Nicholas Petreley   Caldera Systems - LinuxWorld/InfoWorld
nicholas at petreley.com - http://www.petreley.com - Eph 6:12
**********************************************************
.