Re: Base distro + Requirements definition

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas urgent rug ac be>]

> --> Regardless, is it agreed that we should ship "alien" or an
> equivalent utility? ("The software you have chosen to install was
> designed for: Slackware Would you like to adapt it for use on your
> computer? [Adapt It] [Cancel]")

personally, I'm very much against this.  I used to do silly stuff like 
that all the time until I learned the value of decent packaging strategy.  
You can't even safely install rpms from other rpm distro's on your own 
distro.  90% of users complaints on any distro come from the fact of 
having installed other rpms.

Having become very intimate with packaging rpms, I've come to the 
conclusion that :

a) writing specs that work across all rpm distros is only possible in the 
most simple of cases (almost no deps, no dirty tricks, no special compile 
stuff, ...)
b) building packages that work across all rpm distros is even harder 
(eg., please don't install suse or mdk stuff on redhat.  The only things 
that kind of are ok are freshrpms (made for redhat) and PLD ones

I can only imagine what horrors stuff like alien would do ;) They can only 
do a half-assed job that might or might not work and have unpredictable 
behaviour for whatever else you do after that.

Stuff like alien should be highly discouraged at all both from an 
integration point of view and a common sense pov.  Alien is for lazy gits 
;)

Thomas

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