Re: GNOME Summary Dec 15, 1999 - Jan 3, 2000: Miguel wins "Innovatorof the Year," Linux Journal article on GNOME, interview with GNOME developers,call for packaging volunteers, GNOME Logo environment, CTWM support, Software:Balsa, BEAST/BSE, Dia, libxml, Sugar

[Nils Philippsen <nils wombat dialup fht-esslingen de>]

On Mon, 3 Jan 2000 bob@cs.csoft.net wrote:

> <Snip> :)
> 
> I have been thinking about the package management stuff. The problem is,
> the package managers are not compatible. While alien is handy to convert
> between them, it doesnt allways work. What we need, is some kind of system
> where we can create a universal .pm file, and run a program on it to
> generate .spec files and debian files, and whatever other pm files so that
> we only have to make one pm file instead of many. This would make
> maintaining this stuff simple. Also, a utility could be created to
> parse in a Makefile.am and that way, it could keep track of changes to
> files that get installed, without needing recodeing of the .pm file every
> time. With this kind of setup, the lack of packages for any system would
> be solved. they could just grab the tarball if no package exists, and
> rpm -ta (or the equivilent) it. 

The problem is that distributions are different from each other (why else
would they exist if not due to this :-). So you can't just produce an RPM,
you have to produce a SuSE RPM, a Red Hat RPM and so on. At the moment, I
think it would be best to have the packages hand-tailored for the specific
distribution.

Just my 0.02EUR,
Nils
-- 
 Nils Philippsen / Berliner Straße 39 / D-71229 Leonberg // +49.7152.209647
nils@wombat.dialup.fht-esslingen.de / nils@fht-esslingen.de / nils@redhat.de
   The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
   regarded as a criminal offence.                  -- Edsger W. Dijkstra