Re: Package managment idea...

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Fri, 25 Dec 1998, Jason Nordwick wrote:
> > or source-code only (BSD ports).
> 
> This is not true.  As an example, I point you to either the CVSup binary
> packages, the X11 binary packages, and the /bin binary package.  There are
> more references.
>

All right, I thought they were source only. I stand corrected. If they
have sufficient dependency info they could even work with something like
Apt.
 
> >Tarballs and source are not packages in the sense we care about here.
> 
> You will _never_ get away from the.  They are part of the UNIX way and have
> been that way since before you were programming.
> 

I don't want to get away from it, but there is no way to write a package
manager for tarballs. A generic GUI simply can't handle them because build
setups are not predictable and there's no dependency information. End of
story. tarballs are for command-line users unless they are packages that
happen to be in tar.gz format (like dpkg and slp).

If you write the code proving me wrong, I'll be impressed enough to eat my
words in a very public way. I get to provide the tarball to test your
code. ;-) 

Note that I'm not dismissing the virtues of the traditional way, but I am
saying it won't work for a GUI environment. This is what I meant by
"packages in the sense we care about here."

Anyway, this has nothing to do with Gnome and is clearly outside the scope
of the Gnome project. The proof is that any package system will have to
work in a no-GUI environment.

Havoc