A lot of whining, little substance [LWN.net]

A lot of whining, little substance

Posted May 22, 2005 22:00 UTC (Sun) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
In reply to: A lot of whining, little substance by b7j0c
Parent article: What the Linux Desktop Needs (OS Views)

> This is false. Creating an RPM is a reusable process, but the resulting file is not portable between RPM supporting distros. Rarely are they portable even between versions of the same distro.

I was talking about creating a SPEC file (which is a text file - a script of sorts). One gets binary (and source) RPMS as a result of running a build process against that script. Most spec files (and this is where the work goes) ARE portable between different distros and different versions of the distro.

Don't confuse the RPM with its spec file.

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A lot of whining, little substance

Posted May 23, 2005 16:31 UTC (Mon) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

>> I was talking about creating a SPEC file

and what does that buy you? .tgz's are also portable between distros. your argument comes down to nothing more than compiling from source.

A lot of whining, little substance

Posted May 23, 2005 20:01 UTC (Mon) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

The author of the article was whining about great difficulties for ISVs (i.e. peopel with the source for their proprietary software) to support more than one RPM based distro. This is nonsense - all the work goes into creating a single spec file, after which you run rpmbuild against it, which then creates the binary and source RPMs, signs them and finds majority of the dependencies automatically (i.e. you don't have to hard code them at all). If one is clever, the same file can create package versions automatically depending on the distro. All one needs to do is upload them to the web server.

I don't see why that is so hard. And it gets better - there are gazillion SPEC files floating around. Heck, Fedora Extras even has an RPM that creates a template SPEC file according to the Extras guidelines. I would think that ISVs willing to play in the Linux market would be aware of such things...