Re: Packaging formats

[Matthew C Barry <muramas oitunix oit umass edu>]

Just to add a my 2 cents to the mix...

I used Redhat for about 3 years, and I recently installed debian on a
new server. wow.

Packaging is definitely cool, but .deb is LIGHT YEARS ahead of .rpm.  I
mean, keeping rpm compatibility is... neato.  But... debian packages are
simply better, in many respects (not the least of which is that if you
want to install an rpm, you need to find it and dl it, whereas if you want
to install a .deb, its "apt-get install <package-name>" =).  Gnome was
actually a prime example of this.. Gnome for Redhat based systems involves
15 or 20 rpms, where as "apt-get install task-gnome-desktop" does
basically everything.

Also worth mentioning is the ports system used by FreeBSD; I dont have too
much experience with it, but i hear its good..

Anyway, yeah.  Cheers.

Z


On Thu, 9 Mar 2000, bighead wrote:

> 
> On Wed, 8 Mar 2000, Sarel J. Botha wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> > 
> > -- 
> > ------------------
> > Sarel Botha
> > sjb@dundee.lia.net
> > ------------------
> > 
> > 99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
> >           fix one bug, compile it again...
> >           101 little bugs in the code....
> > 
> > 
> > -- 
> > To unsubscribe: mail gnome-devel-list-request@gnome.org with "unsubscribe"
> > as the Subject.
> > 
> I think thats why we have the true universal packaging format
> 
> "foo.tar.gz"
> 
> PEACE
> Archit
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> To unsubscribe: mail gnome-devel-list-request@gnome.org with "unsubscribe"
> as the Subject.
> 
> 

-----------------------
       agent z
erisian hacker alliance
 muramas@linuxfreak.com

  knowledge is power
   nothing is sacred