<quote who="Mike MacCana">
> Of course, the ability of those packages to integrate with the rest of the
> system is fairly limited if they're turned into dumb archives by a program
> such as alien, which, when run on an rpm based system, will turn rpm into
> effectively dumb archives in dpkg format - having no dependency
> information whatsoever and removing the purpose of having a packaging
> system in the first place.
LSB packages are not designed to completely integrate regardless of the
native OS packaging system. Think about it - SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat, they
all use RPM as their package format, but their packages are all alarmingly
different.
The LSB *must* define a format for packages that work across LSB-compliant
operating environments, but it *cannot* define how they integrate. It would
be a far more intrusive standard if it attempted to do that.
So, regardless of the native packaging format, LSB packages will islands. :)
> > Subtle, but important for an accurate reading of the LSB and what it
> > requires.
>
> Which has been done. You don't seem to be saying anything different than
> what I am.
RPM is not the "standard packaging format for Linux", as you stated. It is,
however, the package format selected by LSB as a common distribution format
for application developers targeting LSB-compliant operating environments.
Again, it is a subtle difference, but a crucial one. If you don't understand
it fully, try shipping a few LSB packages across LSB-compliant OSes: They
end up as useful as tarballs with metadata, which provides far less than the
full capabilities provided by RPM packages designed for a particular
platform.
This really has nothing to do with the RPM format, the deb format, dpkg, rpm
or particular distributions. It's not a religious issue.
- Jeff
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