[H-GEN] The Future of Packaging

[David Findlay]

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What I think is needed is a change in the way Linux software is packaged. 
There should be a single binary package format for all distro's. Packages 
would only list relative paths to files. A distribution would have a config 
file saying where different types of files should go. For instance docs in 
/usr/doc/. In this way any package would be compatible with any distribution. 

Packages should be able to have multiple architectures in the one file, for 
instance data would be marked as noarch in the package, and libraries and 
executable binaries could be included in the one package for i386, i586, and 
ppc. 

Such a system would allow you to change from one distribution to another just 
by changing the urls in your package downloader and installer. 

David
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