On May 20, 2010, at 11:03 AM, Dominique Dumont wrote:
On Thursday 20 May 2010 10:03:55 Denis Washington wrote:
How does that sound?
A bit like some ideas I have regarding packaging for ISV ;-) :
http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2010/UniversalPackageForIsv
I proposed this for Google Summer of code, but no student stepped up.
These ideas are not well fleshed out, and I don't have time to work on them
until probably 2011 (I'm mentoring another project regarding package config
upgrade).
Feel free to re-use what you want.
Thanks for the pointer. Looks interesting, although the problem of
merely defining a format, as lined out in the wiki page you linked to,
is that support for that must be in the distros, which is somewhat a
show-stopper as I explained.
However, it would probably be a good idea to define a package format
after (if) the API is widely adopted, as a long-term solution. The
obvious advantage of a specified format opposed to the API (which will
have to always be there as an alternative, though, for cross-platform
installers and the like) is that installing is more secure, as packages
of that format would be verified and installed by the system with no
dangerous third-party code running (provided only restricted scriptlets
are allowed). The API, on the other hand, requires ISV-provided
installer code which will most likely have to run as root (but that's
the case with current installers not using the API, too).
All in all, a package format would be good for the future, but in the
short run I'll concentrate on an API + metadata definitiion approach.
Regards,
Denis Wahsington
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