Untz: Results of the App Installer meeting, and some thoughts on cross-distro collaboration

Posted Jan 26, 2011 22:07 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

there is work that can be re-used (figuring out what apps and library versions a particular application needs for example)

Most of that is done automatically today. E.g. in Fedora the packaging guidelines specify that only in rare cases the packager should give dependencies explicitly.

keep in mind that there are applications that do a pretty good job of converting between .deb and .rpm today, that could be enhanced, or a new metadata format could be created that contains a superset of the data that the different package formats need (making the job of creating packages for multiple distros easier)

It isn't just a "format" issue, the differences are in packaging policies (i.e., what packages are named, how much to split up packages for libraries, handling of documentation). And futhermore there are differences in configuration handling (e.g., how/if default configurations are handled, where configuration is kept, how it is handled).

also, feeding patches between distros and to the upstream will also help reduce duplicated effort.

That is a distribution policy issue. I believe distributions have gotten ever better at working (with) upstream, keeping local patches only where strictly necessary (or as an interim fix while upstream fixes their code).

Disclaimer: I'm a Fedora user and ambassador, so the above might certainly be biased by the distribution I do know best.