Packaging stuff

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

   From: Rahul Dave <rahul at reno.cis.upenn.edu>
   Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 11:43:35 -0400 (EDT)

   Read the proposal I made
   http://reno.cis.upenn.edu/~rahul/standards/packrdf/   
   ..the basic idea is to
   aggregate a dependency graph on the fly from rpm database,
   deb database, and say, for example .tgz database. RDF is good for this,
   and in the case of rpm, we already have an implementation. Now my
   configure can use one dependency from rpm, and one from deb, and the
   next rpm install can use a dependency from this configure(or oracle
   installer, or whatever

There's an amazing amount of hand-waving in your proposal.  All the RDF
is at the moment is a way of storing the existing Provides and Requires
information of RPM's in XML.  This doesn't address the need to
standardize what is actually *in* Provides and Requires line in either
an RPM or the RDF.  It's merely a different way of storing that
information separately from the RPM.  Hence, it doesn't even come close
to addressing the problem.    

It's also nothing like the other vague handwaving made by Nick and
Anthony about some "protocol" run by some installer program, which was
what I was responding to in my first message.   One of the advantages of
being vague and using lots of handwaving is that folks can think they
are all agreeing, when in fact they are really trying to do very
different things.

						- Ted