Re: Base distro + Requirements definition

[Miles Lane <miles megapathdsl net>]

On Tue, 2002-06-25 at 09:44, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> > --> Regardless, is it agreed that we should ship "alien" or an
> > equivalent utility? ("The software you have chosen to install was
> > designed for: Slackware Would you like to adapt it for use on your
> > computer? [Adapt It] [Cancel]")
> 
> personally, I'm very much against this.  I used to do silly stuff like 
> that all the time until I learned the value of decent packaging strategy.  
> You can't even safely install rpms from other rpm distro's on your own 
> distro.  90% of users complaints on any distro come from the fact of 
> having installed other rpms.
> 
> Having become very intimate with packaging rpms, I've come to the 
> conclusion that :
> 
> a) writing specs that work across all rpm distros is only possible in the 
> most simple of cases (almost no deps, no dirty tricks, no special compile 
> stuff, ...)
> b) building packages that work across all rpm distros is even harder 
> (eg., please don't install suse or mdk stuff on redhat.  The only things 
> that kind of are ok are freshrpms (made for redhat) and PLD ones
> 
> I can only imagine what horrors stuff like alien would do ;) They can only 
> do a half-assed job that might or might not work and have unpredictable 
> behaviour for whatever else you do after that.
> 
> Stuff like alien should be highly discouraged at all both from an 
> integration point of view and a common sense pov.  Alien is for lazy gits 
> ;)

What about the Linux Standards Base and UnitedLinux?
Would we be able to have users load more "alien"
packages safely if we comply with LSB?  Hopefully,
there will be more LSB compliant distros out there
eventually.

I love Red Carpet  If we do go off and tweak a
lot of packages, we'll need a very large repository
and an online package management client like Red Carpet.  

	Miles