[lsb-discuss] [packaging] RFC: Berlin Packaging API

[Alan Cox]

On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:33:17 -0500
Robert Schweikert <robert.schweikert at mathworks.com> wrote:

> <snip>
> 
> I certainly agree with the security issues raised by Dan and Sam. The 
> question is how hard would it be to teach dpkg and rpm to deal with more 
> than one db? And of course whether or not such a code change would be 
> accepted by the rpm and deb maintainers.

You can't have more than one db, the user installed packages may have
dependancies between and beyond their own scope (eg user installed app a
requires lib version b which means user installed app c from a different
user conflicts and worse still system updates wanting to install version
'c' are prevented breaking the automatic patching).

Its a very very large can with a lot of worms in it.

Alan