Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now?
Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now?
Posted Jul 7, 2010 13:27 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)In reply to: Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now? by tzafrir
Parent article: Zimmerman: Weve packaged all of the free software what now?
The meta-packager would have to have some rules. (I run into this a lot with .deb packages vs. CPAN modules.)
For example, the meta-packager could be told to prefer .debs if they are new enough to satisfy requirements. Otherwise, fall back on CPAN.
This is a very hard problem, though. And if you want to allow more than one version of a package to be installed at the same time, it gets totally nightmarish. This is why (in my experience) most real-world systems consist of distributor packages plus a few hand-installed and hand-maintained non-packages. And this makes security updates complex and annoying.