On Sun, Jul 01, 2001 at 01:08:04AM +0200, Martin F. Krafft wrote: > > sure, that would be a possiblity, but rather than merging and going > with redhat (come on, they are walking micro$oft footsteps), DEB is > very powerful and can easily exist by itself. a little > cross-compatibility is needed, but rather than surrendering and > converting to RPM, it should be the community's goal to establish DEB > at least to be a second standard, causing vendors and distributors to > package with DEB as well as RPM. > > just my 2 pfennige. i would really hate to see DEB go away.
exactly, and alien provides any cross compatibility needed, someone was also talking about a dpkg-rpm which would do the conversion more on the fly (and i would hope always turn off --force-overwrite...). i would still consider it utterly foolish for anyone to actually install an rpm of any sort on a debian system, as i do now. LSB does not define hardly any policy about putting together decent packages so the current /contrib hell of rpmland will not change. IMNSHO the LSB seriously erred on this, the .deb format makes far more sense as a baseline package format standard then rpm for the simple reason that the .deb format isn't really a format, its just an ar archive with gzipped tarballs! those formats are nearly the oldest *real* standards as you can get with *nix. .deb can be extracted on ANY OS, even an old decrepid proprietary UNIX host. a baseline standard package format should be something that does not require special tools to deal with, tar.gz and .deb meet that criteria, rpm does not. you can for example extract a .deb on a stock slackware system, not true of rpm. (unless slackware started including rpm in the base since i last looked..) -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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