These questions to me frame the entire set of problems for any existing packaging system that tries to integrate with a native one or when you have a 3rd party providing the packages instead of the original project.
On 6/29/05, Keith M Wesolowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > - If new packages are added in existing consolidations, how should > they be named? Where is the registry that prevents conflicts? Having a central package registry where definitive names could be defined that all packagers should use regardless of which system they're packaging for would be a nice start to helping solve dependency, package replacement, or package upgrade issues. > - How do you prevent the situation in which multiple packages could > satisfy a dependency but they have different names? Conversely, how > would you prevent the existence of incompatible packages with the same > names? This seems to be an age old problem that no one has yet solved. After having spent years working with different packaging systems and reading various philosophies posted by others I don't think there is a golden bullet solution to this problem. As long as humans are the ones packaging software, each one of them will tend to do things differently, because obviously their own way is better ;) For example, some RPM based Distributions have progname, progname-devel, and progname-debug for almost every program. Where the first is the program, the second is development headers and devel specific libraries or tools, and the third is debug information that can be additionally installed when so desired. Yet other distributions only have progname, and bundle development headers, debug info and everything into one item. Then of course comes the naming conventions as you mentioned, they love to prefix all of their packages with special initials, and use a different versioning scheme than others so that even when you're using the same package format the system goes crazy trying to figure out what to do when you attempt upgrades. Then of course some people will never conform to a universal set of rules, they have their own packages, their own directory structure, and to heck with complying with any type of rules. -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
