Re: RH and GNOME
Enrique Zanardi <ezanardi@ull.es> wrote:
> So there are (at least) two cons, and I still don't see any pro. I ask
> again : what's wrong with alien? Why do we need a * unified package
> system?
Oh, that's easy.
Commercial software vendors want to be able to add one port to their port
list, and be able to tick off linux as a whole. If that means that they
produce, for example:
oracle_8.0-1_i386.lsb
and then their job is done, great. If you tell them that they've got a
choice, or that they have to produce one for each distribution, they will be
significantly less happy.
In my opinion, many commercial vendors would find both .rpm and .deb too
complicated to build, so we should go for a system that is capable of dealing
with something that is little more than a .tar.gz, as a bare minimum.
Why ?
Well, the number of commercial apps I've seen installed on commercial Unices,
where the incompetence of the installation script, combined with the
incompetence of the person doing the installation, resulted in company data
being owned by root.root and set to be world writable, makes me think that we
want to make this as simple as possible.
One possible approach would be to allow vendors to do what they like under
``/opt/vendorname'' and then have the installer check for various things, like
the presence of ``/opt/vendorname/bin'' and use an update alternatives style
mechanism to insert the contents into the path.
Allowing /opt/vendorname/packagename as an alternative would probably be a
good idea too.
It should also support a more integrated approach, similar to .deb/.rpm for
the vendors that are competent enough to actually understand packaging, and
want to take advantage of more advance features (pre/post-install scripts etc.)
Cheers, Phil.
P.S. Shaya, this might be worth a mention on the base-eng list when
the subject is next allowed an airing.
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