Kaixo!
On Thu, Jun 22, 2000 at 08:34:20AM -0500, Bryan Paxton wrote:
> In my quest for more info on how to improve RPM I turned once again to debian.
> dpkg has a nice little function of Provides:
> // Priority of a package. This is really only used in dselect to set up default
> // packages to be installed.
> Priority: extra
That is a good candidate for addition into rpm, indeed.
> // This I don't like, dselect(and only dselect) will not install said package
> // if these packages aren't installed. dpkg and apt really pay no attention to
> // this variable.
> Recommends: mail-reader, perl5 | perl
[provides/requires "mail-transport-agent"]
> This is the only part of the .deb control file I wanted to cover in this post
> since it's the most valuable part of dpkg that could be implemented into RPM.
It is by no means something specific to deb format.
rpm can jsut as well do it too (and indeed that is used, however I agree
not as systematic as in Debian, maybe because REd Hat started with providing
only one package per task, and that feature wasn't needed).
Another problem is, while it can be more or less easy to define such
keywords for a single distrib, as in the case of Debian, it gets more hairy
when it comes to rpm packages that can be used on several distributions.
(in ther words, the choice of the strings to use is something to discuss
at a Linux standardization level, imho)
the only two things I see from your example that the deb format has and not
the rpm format are the "priority" and "recommends" tag.
And I think it would indeed be a good thing to have them in standard in rpm.
--
Ki �a vos v�ye b�n,
Pablo Saratxaga
http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975
