LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Dan Shearer <dan@linuxcare.com>
  To  : linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
  Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2000 10:09:58 +0930 (CST)

RE: Package management in free OSs

Seems like I'm not the only one who can't see much of a road ahead for
current (Linux) packaging systems, despite various good features about
both rpm and deb!

Victor Wodecki (victor.wodecki@baesystems.com, on this list but unable to
post at the moment) told me of an effort to create a new packaging system.
See http://www.liacs.nl/~wichert/talks (I got the PDF rather than wade
through the same thing in HTML slides). This is a very significant effort
because primary developers of both rpm and deb are involved. I don't see
anyone from BSD involved, but then I've not heard any BSD people suggest
that they aren't happy with their packaging format (except Mark Newton by
implication, in proposing SGI's as a better solution if it can be freed.)
This new effort is designed to _not_ be Linux specific though.

One key slide:

 We already have the deb and rpm formats which work fine 
 and are well supported. So why a new format?

   * supporting two formats is troublesome for vendors
   * both formats lack a couple of desirable features:

       - internationalization support
       - multiple architecture and OS support
       - multiple payloads
 
 In order to resolve these issues we decided that it was desirable to
 design a new format that will hopefully replace deb and rpm and become the new 
 standard packaging format.
 
A list of objectives is given:

1 Extractable using traditional UNIX tools
2 Must support all features of the deb and rpm formats
3 Must support signatures and checksums
4 Must not be Linux-specific
5 Must be extensible

I'm not so sure about goal (2), depending how they implement it. Hopefully
they really mean "no useful functionality will be lost", because otherwise
it sounds a recipie for bloat.

The metadata is to be held in XML format, which seems like a good idea.
The whole thing seems very much aimed at binary package management.

The following final point is made, which is also a very good one:

  An important thing to note is that most of the differences between
  distributions do not arise from the package format used, but from the
  policies used in creating packages. This means that:

    * distributions will not become more alike
    * package will not magically become portable, this needs 
      efforts like LSB and FHS

Dan

-- 
LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/  IRC: #linuxsa on irc.linux.org.au
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject