[packaging] Useing distro package managers. Was: Re: Meeting next week to discuss trusted third-party repositories

[Denis Washington]

Dan Kegel wrote:
>> There is the issue of
>> having multiple formats that will have to be solved. My proposed solution is
>> that the ISV publishes a tar or tar.gz file with a diffrent file extension
>> say ufo / ufo.gz the default program for opening these files would be a tiny
>> shell script that uses alien to change the file to the distro's format then
>> calls the package manager.
>>     
>
> I prefer living with the existing distro formats.  ISVs can fairly easily
> do the alien'ing or rebuilding on their own, and provide repos in
> the two or three popular distro formats.  We need to keep a big squeaky
> bat to hit anybody who comes up with a new format, supporting two
> is plenty hard, I'm not at all happy with Pardus for inventing a new one.
> - Dan

I think a new package format is not a problem. It means that ISVs just 
have to maintain one single package and one single repo, and for users 
that they don't have to constantly be aware of the distro they are using 
to pick the right format, so I'm all for a dedicated LSB package format. 
But a new format does *not* mean a second package management 
infrastructure; remember that the format is just the representation of 
the package, nothing more. rpm, dpkg etc. would just get front-ends to 
read the LSB format in addition to their own, much like image editors, 
although they have their own powerful formats, are still able to read 
the common image formats like PNG. Most of these front ends to the 
native package manager could even be a common code base, with the 
distributions only having to write small backends for their packaging 
system. In my opinion, this is very much preferable to the 
multiple-format situation.

Cheers,
Denis