Why are RPM's distro specific?

[Elliot Lee]

It's great to see well-informed answers to fedora-list questions. We need
more people like Deron :-)

Kudos,
-- Elliot

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Deron Meranda wrote:

> On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:00:47 -0500, Marc M <linuxr at gmail.com> wrote:
> > RPMs are for Redhat-based distributions only,
> 
> Red Hat sponsored the development of the RPM format and software,
> but it is no longer just for Red Hat distributions.  In fact, some people
> use RPM on commercial Unixes (non-Linux).
> 
> But as said, the main reasons RPMs tend to be specific to a
> particular distro are,
> 
> 1. Assumptions made about system configuration, such as
> pathnames to config file locations, boot script setups, existing
> users and groups, and so on.
> 
> 2. Dependencies on other packages, including how those
> packages are named, compiled, or even in some cases
> where they are installed or what patches have been made
> to the virgin source.
> 
> And of course the usually unstated: testing.  Making sure
> that all the different packages do in fact work well together
> and don't cause conflicts.
> 
> Thus, the "portability" of an RPM is mostly a factor of
> how self-contained the software is, versus how much
> it has to depend on or integrate into the rest of the
> system.  For instance RPMs for man pages tend to
> be very portable, while an RPM for something complex
> like X is not too portable.
>