Re: Why ?

[Jeff Johnson <n3npq nc rr com>]

David Ginger wrote:

> Please do'nt flame me for this....
>
> I do'nt really know a whole lot about packaging, but I have some questions 
> that I would appreciate some straight answers or url.
>
> Why is it that I meet so many people who bitch about dependencies ?
> This does'nt directly effect me, so I do'nt know what they are rambling on 
> about . . . . 
>  

Some upgrades have prerequisites, which have other prerequisites. etc. etc.
Discovery of which packages satisfy prerequisites is tedious.

But mostly, people like to bitch. ;-)

> The other thing that puzzles me is why srpm are not advocated and used more. 
> Becuase the other thing I hear is the old "Its better to compile it 
> yourself". Well yea, thats why I "use"  pun intended --target athlon, in my 
> case.
>  

Presumably, you mean building your own packages from src.rpm. Setting up
a build system can be tricky, particularly if iteratively, missing component
causes build failure, fix, restart. The goal of packaging is to 
alleviate the
necessity to build from scratch. So there's little need for "advocacy", but
many people build from src.rpms. Certainly, Red Hat does.

> The other thing I hear from my LUG is that , dare I mention it .deb is 
> supposed to better. I find that hard to belive, becuase if there were any 
> real break throughs would'nt the idea be folded into rpm ?
>  

Usually .deb is considered better because it can be unpacked only with
common system tools. While that's true, it's quite possible to unpack
.rpm's with common tools as well. Why either of the above is an
important distinguishing feature for formats that are unpacked with
custom tools 99+% of the time escapes me.

Yes, if there were any feature that was truly superior in .deb format, 
then that
feature would have been stolen from .deb format and implemented in .rpm
format years ago.

In fact, .deb's use an ar archive format for the package with a couple
of tarballs inside, while .rpm's concatenate 4 sections to form a package
with a cpio ball inside.

Not many (interesting) distinguishing features between .deb and .rpm 
format at all.

73 de Jeff