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

[bob cs csoft net]

Well, other then different prefixes, there is not much different. Maybe
there could be a list of prefixes for each dist. That would fix that
problem.

On Tue, 4 Jan 2000, Nils Philippsen wrote:

> 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
>