On Tue, 2007-08-07 at 02:22 +0100, Greg K Nicholson wrote: > Drive-by href: http://autopackage.org/
I think Autopackage has the wrong idea. From a technical perspective most package formats contain the same data, so converting between them should be easy. The actual problem is the contents of the packages, the data and metadata itself. A Debian package for Debian might not work in Ubuntu so making another format isn't the point. Forgetting tricky technical issues like compiler and library versions and focusing on the metadata; there is no point depending on 'foo' if that functionality is provided by 'bar' in another distro. This is the key area to standardise, after that is done then tools like alien could improve significantly and upstream packaging would be more feasable (and if upstreams are packaging their own software then those would become the standard across distros, hopefully creating a feedback loop to keep things running smoothly). Of course I am not saying distros should not do their own packaging, but if upstreams release files compatible with the quality-assured distro files then those who don't rely on strict QA are free to use whatever packages they find. As a side note I think that the idea of a list of third party repos is flawed. It doesn't solve us-and-them issues, it just creates an us-and-these-and-them situation. The solution needs to be implementable by anyone, decentralised, robust and generic. Thanks, Chris Warburton -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
