Re: Packaging formats

[aj facade dhs org]

Here is a link for people interested in a universal packaging format:
	http://freshmeat.net/news/2000/02/12/950417940.html 
This is an in depth discussion of the requirements of a universal
packaging system, and is a survey of the general state of packaging.

In reference to a earlier question, the Debian packaging system is fully
covered at:
	http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/packaging.html/

IMHO the best way to distribute Gnome is to point end users to their
own distributions Gnome packages.  Most of these distributions have
package maintainers hard at work keeping everything bug free.

For the "build it yourself" folks, a tarball that dumps binaries/everything
into /opt/$GNOME_VERSION/|/usr/local{bin|doc|...} is the way to go.
This is the behaviour specified by the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard at:
	http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-4.6.html 
	and http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-3.8.html 

These directories are not to be modified by the packaging system,
and as such are Administrator maintained.  If the user doesn't know
how to set up PATH etc, and maintain their own installs, they should be
using a packaging system of their choice.

The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is at:
	http://www.pathname.com/fhs/

(I love the Gnome Terminals handling of drag and drop URLs from Netscrape.)

Adrian Johnston.