On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 09:14:46PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote: > On Fri, Oct 01, 2010 at 05:56:27PM +0100, Evan Dandrea wrote: > > I believe that in order to do this properly, we need to massively > > simplify our packaging model. Anything that makes a package > > non-atomic (hello maintainer scripts) should be thrown out. Anything > > that adds needless complexity, equally so. Packaging needs to be the > > least important part of the puzzle, not the most difficult, and most > > certainly not at the core of our own development efforts. > > There are few pressing reasons to change the *binary* package format > significantly, and many reasons not to. The core implementation is > robust yet flexible, knowledge of bits of it is in lots of different > parts of the core system, we use many of its features in non-trivial but > mission-critical ways, and you generally only want to have one package > manager on the system rather than having two of them fighting it out. > Plus I rather suspect that if we tried to reimplement it then the > chances are good that we'd end up in a situation where we had two > package managers neither of which quite met our needs.
I don't think we need to replace dpkg, but I think it might be beneficial to have more than one subsystem for managing installation of components. The requirements are very different at each end of the scale (low-level system libraries to distributed applications). (I elaborate on this in http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2010/07/06/weve-packaged-all-of-the-free-software-what-now/) While in some cases it may be sufficient to simply ignore the more complex features offered by dpkg, I think there are fundamental assumptions there which are much harder to remove (e.g. root privileges). That said, I agree with you that there are gains to be found in how we work with source packages. -- - mdz -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
