On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 11:07:41 +1200 Jim Cheetham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 10:40, Nick Rout wrote: > > Jim Cheetham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > And the other points you make are true, but don't move me. tar has > > > become the canonical distribution archive, so proficiency with tar is > > > There is no standard for packages in the linux world, but there are a > > few that vie for that accolade, and rpm must be one of them. > > Bzzzzt. No Feeding The Troll. There is a canonical standard for software > distribution in the *unix* world, and that's a tarball of the source > files. > > I think you're trolling with RPM ... maybe i was. Isn't it time for a flamewar LOL? And I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with you (perhaps i should have made that clear. Perhaps i should also have made it clear that my post was to point out the connection between cpio and rpm. I went on a bit further, to forestall people who might reply "rpm is crap which just proves the point that cpio is crap/unnecessary". >I haven't touched an RPM file for > well over 5 years. Linux is not the only Unix ... and of the set of > Linux distributions, "only" RedHat-based systems cling to RPM. err....but there are a large number of leading and popular rpm using and/or redhat-based distros:- eg mandrake, suse, connectiva (huge in south america), > > On a daily basis, I use FreeBSD, Debian & Mac OS X. None of these use > RPM by choice. personally my view is that binary distributions will all have problems when important libraries are updated out of sync with the rest of the distro. leading to rpm hell, or deb hell, or tgz hell. In other words the faults of rpm are the faults of any binary distro. > > > (and rpm's perceived problems have nothing to do with cpio, and are > > largely fixed by putting a layer above it - apt or urpmi for example. > > just the same as dpkg is improved by apt) > > The layer that they need is a "single source" of inter-dependancy > management, like FreeBSD's ports tree, or Debian's distributions. What > they've historically had is multiple independant RPM-producers *per > package*, scattering them all over the net and having no interest in > supporting end-users configs. I suspect that Mandrake are getting good > at this aspect, judging by others' comments. > yep, I'd add gentoo's portage or sorcerer's spell system to the comparison with BSD's ports system. Any of those systems neccessarily have a '"single source" of inter-dependancy management', and I guess ultimately a single point of failure. Except that their open nature should keep them alive :-) > -jim -- Nick Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
