Packaging formats

[Vince Hodges <vhodges home com>]

>>>>> "Sarel" == Sarel J Botha <sjb@dundee.lia.net> writes:

    Sarel> [snip]

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

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

(A little off topic but...) I am working on a package management tool
for slackware and because of the lack of any kind of meta data in
slackware packages, I have been designing an xml based 'meta package'
file format.  It is hoped to be a more general purpose solution than
just slackware.

The project is on sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=2356
There are no releases yet so you'll need to get the sources from cvs
(or just browse them).  The relevant files are in the testXML directory.
Warning, it's still very alpha at the moment.

It should be relativly simple to support many different backends
(alien comes to mind).  Only a slackware (partially) exists right now.

One of the nice things about the current tag set, is that it allows
for compound packages (ie gnome-office) to be easily specified.
Another nice thing is that most of the data in the package format can
be autogenerated from the various application database sites
(freshmeat and so on).

Also, see gip at http://gip.darkorb.net/

-- 
Vince Hodges                             "Beware geeks bearing diffs"
vhodges@home.com 
http://members.home.com/vhodges/