Alexander E. Patrakov wrote: > Gerard Beekmans wrote: > >>> Yes. Note that I have not evaluated pacman. >>> >> Do you by chance have any plans or desire to do so in the near future? >> > > Not in the nearest future--too busy with bureaucracy that surrounds > presenting > the dissertation (scheduled for July, 3). > > >>> What's even more important for educational purposes, Debian rules are >>> incoherent >>> between various Debian packages. >>> >> How does RPM differ in that regard? Couldn't RPM spec files (in theory?) >> suffer from the same problem depending on who writes them? >> > > RPM doesn't have this amount of additional layers of almost-mandatory helpers > for getting dependencies right, and the "debconf" tool for interactive > package > configuration. As I said, a few Debian packagers do things by hand, some use > debhelper, some call cdbs (that doesn't even contain the explicit build > instructions, but is suitable only for simple CMMI-like packages), and there > are > other options. > > 2 additional benefits to rpm: http://rpmlint.zarb.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi rpm lint, to help keep filesystem clean of no-longer used files.
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Development/Howto/Spec-Helper spec-helper, a set of scripts that assists in making the rpms to a consistent format. While many people don't like Mandriva, they have developed a set of tools that work very well, and made them open source. little things like the spec-helper script are valuable for making a "distro" with consistent package manager spec files. [ Mandriva falls short on the package description end. ] -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
