On Mon, 6 Sep 1999, James Dingwall wrote: > I tried the Debian and Red Hat sites, and the specs for their package formats > aren't exactly staring you in the face. Just because something is a de facto > (read RPM) standard doesn't mean that it's best, it is worth examining the > limitations of .rpm and .deb to see if things can be improved.
Debian and Red Hat have a draft packaging standard floating around which isn't quite finished. We've been trying to build standard we can both live with for binary (not source) packages, and have been having reasonable good success. I think we'll have something worth sharing in another month or two. RPM and dpkg already use identical (package, epoch, version, release) semantics (hardly surprising as rpm copied it from dpkg), which has proven itself quite flexible. > means that if the new package is broken, I have to reinstall the old package, > ie have two versions of a package floating around, this is opposed to > uninstalling the new package. It's no good assuming that you will never get a > broken package because you will. It would be trivial to write a quick script that would recreate a package from an installed system. That would let you backup a package, install a new one, and restore the old one quite easily. Erik ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | "For the next two hours, VH1 will be filled with foul-mouthed, | | crossdressing Australians. Viewer discretion is advised." | | | | Linux Application Development -- http://www.redhat.com/~johnsonm/lad |
