Package managment idea...

[Matthew Berg <wdomburg pce net>]

Reading through the package management discussion, there seem to be two
camps - those who believe that Gnome should have its own package
management system for the sake of simplified application installation,
and those who believe that it would be wrong to impose a new format (and
consequently, it is presumed, a completely different set of package
management tools)  on users.

And of course, the idea of standardizing on a Linux specific (and just
as importantly, distribution specific) packaging format would alienate
those using *BSD, Solaris, etc.

What I would personally like to see would be an abstaction library that
would allow for easy translation to a platforms native packaging
format.  Perhaps it would even be wise to define a meta format for GNOME
as both the standard distribution format for gnome applications and as
the internal representation for the abstraction layer.

Take this a step and define a standard CORBA interface between the
abstraction library and native system packaging libraries and/or tools.
This would allow not only for the creation of an installer that could
deal with multiple package types, but would also allow a more robust
application for generic package management.

And, if a system administator doesn't want to use the GNOME tool for the
job, the packages would still be accessible to the package tools that
are native to his platform (e.g. custom on SCO,
swinstall/swlist/swremove on HP-UX).

(Hint: if anyone decides on trying to come up with a new package format,
or something like what I have described, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make sure
it can deal with sub-packaging!  This is one thing I truly --HATE--
about RPM; either the functionality isn't there or nobody uses it.

I would really love to have the choice to not install some of the
programs included in, e.g. gnome-games, if I decide that I really only
want Freecell.  :)

Sorry `bout the rambling,
   Matthew Berg