Matt Zimmerman wrote: > > On Thu, Dec 28, 2000 at 08:22:52AM -0600, Vince Mulhollon wrote: > > > Yes, that was kind of my point. > > > > An analogy would be that we don't need dpkg because most of its > > functionality could be done by a mixture of tar, gzip, and perl (and maybe > > make to handle dependancies). > > Not quite. dpkg-deb actually does call out to tar and gzip, and lets those > programs do what they do best. It doesn't try to be tar and gzip and dpkg all > at once. The UNIX approach is to build tools that do one or a few jobs very > well, and build larger tools out of that code base. That way, once a problem > is solved, it is solved for all programs that share the problem-solving code. >
Code reuse is generally a good idea, but only if depending on external code doesnt compromise your program. If you accidentally deleted gzip or tar how would you recover ? You couldnt build them from a source package or or extract it from a binary package because you need both tar and gzip to extract them. The only thing you could do is get a binary copy from someone elses machine which is a pain if your not on a network. You could use the tar and gzip functionality from busybox if you have it unpacked. Actually i was thinking recently of making a libdpkg-deb that had ar, tar, gzip built in (based on busybox's version). libraries are much beter for code reuse. Glenn
