Organizational Effects?

Posted Sep 29, 2003 23:20 UTC (Mon) by ranger (guest, #6415) [Link]

This proves not to be the case; at least, there are many unnofficial sources for packages wrapped up in .deb form, and in my admittedly not extensive experience they work just fine.

But, they are all for Debian.

If you use RPMS made explicitly for Mandrake on Mandrake (which are also available in many places), they also work fine. The problems of binary packages come in when you install them on a different distribution, with different library versions etc (which break dependencies, and since the release cycles are more than once a decade the ancient package may not be provided in a suitable repository ;-)).

You can get some idea of the scope of third-party .deb packages by visiting apt-get.org.

It seems like >50% of these sites are just back-ports from unstable/testing, which is only necessary on Debian due to the excessively long release cycle. Most rpm-based distros have packages of the same version in their stable releases, so there is no need for backports. For instance, samba packages aren't necessary, since all supported Mandrake releases have 2.2.7a from updates, but there are 2.2.8a pacakges avaialble from the urpmi medium on the samba FTP mirrors, and these have an additional set of LDAP-enabled packages.

Anyway, you can visit http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/?minor=1, and see that there are a number of third-party urpmi media for the few cases where backports are necessary or where software is not welcome in the distro or contrib (due to licensing problems).

BTW, in the sentence " The only difference here is that the only distributeable .deb's are from Debian.", "from" should be taken to mean "built on". I don't think the Lindows users are out there in their masses builing Deb's ...

Or did you mean to suggest that there are no complete .deb-based distros other than the official Debian?

Of course not, but they aren't quite "distributeable" in the way I meant it (unless there are public mirrors for the current version of Libranet etc).

There's less need for such splintering with Debian, since anyone who really wants an obscure package added to Debian can generally achieve that goal unless there's some legalistic restriction (as with the example of mplayer in this comparison).

And there's even less need for this in Mandrake (I am not a Mandrake employee, but maintain packages in main, and many more in contrib). For instance, 9.2 will be release with a full set of free Java software in the form of the Jpackage RPMS, which is a comprehensive set of packages (so much so that you can 'urpmi eclipse' and get *all* the dependencies).

The Fedora Project ought to help with that - indeed, it seems to aim to recreate a distinctly Debian-like organization aside from (I think) continuing to use RPM packages and something other than apt for package management.

And this is what Mandrake has been doing for a long time, but nobody seems to notice that, or even take their time to check the facts ...