extension of lsb packages

[Joey Hess]

Erik Troan wrote:
> >     short lsb_compliant;
> >     char reserved[15];
> 
> I forgot about the reserved bits -- that's obviously a better way to
> do this then I suggested as it will preserve compatibility with old
> versions of RPM (though a byte will suffice).

Yeah, how about something like this:

unsigned char lsb_major, lsb_minor;

Then file could spit out something like "rpm (LSB 1.1 compliant)", or
even "LSB package v1.1".

Dan Keagal has a point here:
> 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?

People talk about deb's and rpm's and so forth. "lsb package" is
unwieldly on the toungue, might as well call it a ".lsb". It would
suffice for the spec to say that .lsb was the preferred extention, but
that proper way to check is to find this byte at that offset.

-- 
see shy jo, who would like to make alien use file to detect rpm's and
            deb's, but has doubts that file can, on all the varied
	    systems alien is used on