Re: Red Carpet 0.9 beta

[Warren Young <tangent cyberport com>]

Renze de Ruiter wrote:
> 
> I wish the Linux community had agreed on one packaging system and stuck to it.

That kind of "agreement" only comes from the top down.  If we had that
kind of agreement, we'd be another Microsoft.  

Indeed, this whole thread came about because of your own diversity: you
use both tarballs and RPMs.  I do that myself.  It's just unfortunate
that Red Carpet, because of what it does, must live entirely within the
RPM (or dpkg) system.

Here's an idea: it should be easy to add a feature to the rpm program to
build a "phantom RPM".  ("rpm -bf", for "fake", since -bp is already
taken.)

A phantom RPM would include the info from the spec file and a listing of
all files that a real RPM would install.  When installed, it would act
like "rpm -Uvh --justdb foopkg.rpm" with a real RPM.  You'd probably
still have to build it from an SRPM or tarball, to get the full file
list, but companies like Red Hat could provide that service.  This would
make a mixed tarball/RPM system much more tractable.

I could have used this just the other night, in fact.  Red Hat 7.1
beta's XFree86 package depends on Mesa, but Mesa requires X11.  You
can't even get around the problem by building from SRPMs, because there
is a real source-level dependency between the two packages.  The
ultimate blame should be on Red Hat for splitting Mesa out of the
XFree86 SRPM package, but still...
--
= Warren -- ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m