LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Christopher Yeoh <cyeoh@linuxcare.com.au>
  To  : Dan Shearer <dan@tellurian.com.au>
  Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 14:49:29 +1100 (EST)

Re: Conclusions on Software Packaging (Linux only, and Long)

Dan Shearer writes:
> message is about the situation on Linux, especially some recent RPM work.
> The binary convergance between RPM and dpkg I wrote about some months ago
> as reported by the principal authors of each system appears not to have
> eventuated.

There is some continuing work being done on this. The Linux Standard
Base people have revived work on this and some associated issues. A
couple of open mailing lists have been setup. For those who are
interested you can subscribe or look at the archives at
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=1107. The relevant mailing lists
are lsb-taskforce1 and lsb-taskforce2.

>     - RPM has no policy implications. It is just a tool. There are some
>       conventions, but look at the number of incompatible rpms to see that
>       there are no particular standards. dpkg is policy-driven. There is
>       pre-determined, predictable right way to do many things. The tool
>       implements, enforces and encourages policy-driven administration.

I suspect that the main problems that people have with RPMs not being
compatible between distributions are not due to the RPM
format. Instead its mainly caused by the way in which the programs
have been built - eg expected directory hierarchy, versions of
libraries linked against etc. Maybe some users of
deb-based-but-not-Debian distibutions (such as Corel and Storm (I
think)) could comment on how well things work when they use Debian
archives as a source for new packages.

> Connectiva, one of the many RPM-based distributions, has been doing some
> with with RPM. They have published two good articles on Freshmeat:
> 
> Is is Time to Change RPM?
> http://freshmeat.net/news/2000/09/16/969163199.html
> 
> An RPM Port of APT
> http://freshmeat.net/news/2000/12/02/975819599.html

Apt support for RPM's sounds very exciting - apt can make it very easy
to keep a system up to date. Unfortunately until distributions are
more compatible, it probably still be necessary to have different
archives for different distributions.

Chris.
-- 
cyeoh@linuxcare.com.au
Support Open Source Ice-Cream

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