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The LSB standard is RPM

Posted Mar 31, 2005 8:34 UTC (Thu) by astrand (guest, #4908)
Parent article: Autopackage 1.0

>it fills a necessary gap until the day that Linux distributions can settle on a standard base system and packaging format.

There is a standard packaging format: LSB has standardized RPM3. Installing RPM packages on Debian works great, by using alien. IMHO, an installation GUI should work as a front end to RPM or Alien. We are using this approach with the ThinLinc installation program, and it works great.

Besides, using RPM is a requirement if you want to be RHEL compatible, if I remember correctly.

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The LSB standard is RPM

Posted Mar 31, 2005 10:11 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

There's more. This is from discussion on OSNews (answer on this):
Now Mr Hess is coming from the perspective of "how do I make alien support this", and he has discovered that you cannot. Good. That is also by design.
The right way to integrate autopackage with dpkg and rpm is for it to manipulate the systems databases directly, not to try and convert package formats ahead of time.

Translation from English to English: you see - installation of any program in Windows can bring break anything in your system down and make any other totally unrelated program shaky. This game of "russian roulette" is so good that we really should introduce it in Linux - otherwise Windows users will not feel at home. Autopackage makes such russian roulette real in Linux: congratulations.

P.S. Do RPM and DEB formats have protection against "russian roulette" style of work ? To some degree: a lot of work is done by package system and not by pre- and post- install scripts. Yet, there are still possibility of things going astray (but without cooperation there between different distributions it's quite hard to do more) so rigorous testing of distribution maintainers does the rest. Autopackage makes problem worse and simultaneously encourages installation of stuff from around the globe without help of distribution maintainers. To me it looks like clear recipe for disaster.

The LSB standard is RPM

Posted Mar 31, 2005 23:13 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

There is one, and only one program that should be manipulating the package information on Debian: dpkg. It's system-critical information, and I don't want a version of rpm messing with it, much less random packages from the net.

The LSB standard is RPM

Posted Apr 7, 2005 13:11 UTC (Thu) by mikehearn (guest, #29106) [Link]

At least in my experience, distro maintainers hurt as often as they help. I've worked on projects other than autopackage where lots of distro packages have been broken badly, in such a way that we got lots of tech support requests and "bug" reports.

Debian and Gentoo have also both managed to patch, QA and deploy fixes for non-existent security vulnerabilities before.

In other words, I think your assumption that autopackages will be bad compared to distro packages is itself a bad one.

But we'll see. Only time will tell.