extension of lsb packages

Dan Kegel dank at kegel.com
Sat Mar 2 17:10:03 PST 2002


Matt Taggart wrote:
> 
> Erik Troan writes...
> 
> > On Fri, 01 Mar 2002 18:41:05 -0700
> > "Matt Taggart" <taggart at carmen.fc.hp.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Another thing I've been thinking about is transition to a future lsb packag
> > e
> > > format. Does naming packages .lsb make that transition any easier/harder?
> >
> > This is Unix (well, almost) folks. Any tool that depends on the extension of
> > a filename to work properly is simply broken.
> 
> Good point. So I think this makes it even more important for file(1) to
> report the right thing so that tools that know how to deal with rpm can use
> it to differentiate between normal rpms and LSB packages.

What line would go in /usr/share/magic to detect an lsb package
(as opposed to an rpm package)?

I personally feel that, even if `file` can distinguish lsb's from rpm's,
lsb packages should end in .lsb.  After all, people depend on the .tgz
and .gz suffixes, don't they?  The gzip command likes the .gz suffix,
doesn't it?  Make obeys suffixes, doesn't it?

It's false to argue that Unix has moved on beyond file suffixes.  
Unix developers depend on them daily, as do web browsers.
- Dan




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