Packaging formats

["Sarel J. Botha" <sjb dundee lia net>]

Hi everyone

I was just reading a bit of the stuff at www.helixcode.com. In particular:

The Helix GNOME Desktop ships with several powerful applications, including
a file manager; GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program; Dia, a
diagram-creation program; and Gnumeric, the GNOME spreadsheet. 

Now for someone thinking of switching over from another Desktop
Environment this would sound really silly. It looks like there are only 4
programs that work on GNOME. I know this is not the case but it looks that
way, and if you were to tell someone there were a bunch of apps at
www.gnome.org it wouldn't help them much because it could be so tricky to
compile them.

What's the answer to that problem? Packaging of course. Another problem of
packaging though is the many standards. I'm only aware of .deb and .rpm but
I believe there are many others too.

My proposal:
A packaging system designed to be 100% rpm, deb and
anything-else-compatible. In other words I compile my program once and it
can be installed on all the different distributions out there using their
native packaging mechanism. I know there are problems between distros like
/usr/doc and /usr/share/doc but this system could address them as well.

I'm definitely not experienced enough to undertake designing something like
this but I'll definitely help.

-- 
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Sarel Botha
sjb@dundee.lia.net
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99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
          fix one bug, compile it again...
          101 little bugs in the code....