[H-GEN] The Future of Packaging

[Raymond Smith]

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Hi David,

On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, David Findlay wrote:
> 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.

Are you advocating that we standardise on a package format, or
proposing a new one? If a new one, what would be different to RPM
or .deb?

> 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.

I agree that this would be useful -- but you would probably only want to
do it for a 'family' of packages (say all of x86, or 32-bit and 64-bit
SPARC) or the code bloat would be tremendous.

I think the Linux Standards Base is doing work in this area. You might
like to trawl around the net and see if you can contribute to their work.

Cheers,

Raymond
---
raymond at humbug.org.au     "Try, or try not. There is no do." -- said during
                          a linux.conf.au 2002 organising committee meeting


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