Re: Softwares sugestion

[Tim Moore <tmoore tembel org>]

On Tue, 15 Sep 1998, Reklaw wrote:

> I, personally, was taking my stance from the LACK of binary RPMs for
> most systems other than GNU/Linux on i386.

As a PPC user, I have to agree with this observation. OTOH, if they're
there, you can use them, and if they're not, you can make them!

> As for SRPMs, I think
> most people, including me, don't see a benifit over tarballs.

Well, there's the fact that when you finish compiling, you end up with a
binary RPM, with all of the associated installation management benefits
(which is what started this thread in the first place).

> 
> Maybe that is something RedHat and Debian should make clearer.

Well, to the Debian project's credit, they do have parallel package trees
on their FTP site for various architectures, and for GNU/Hurd, but not for
other OSes.


But my point remains. I'm not trying to deny the fun of tarballs to those
who want them, but the original topic of the thread was a suggestion for a
tarball installation/uninstallation manager. My point is that it would
simply duplicate RPM and dpkg, and not really provide any additional
benefit. I certainly advocate making tarballs of GNOME and other software
*available*, but there's no need for another package manager, and no real
problem with the file format of RPMS and SRPMS or debs. In fact, both RPM
and dpkg support building binary packages from an ASCII control/spec file
and a tarball (with an optional patch file).

Tim