Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 14, 2019 11:27 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Seeking consensus on dh by mirabilos
Parent article: Seeking consensus on dh

> Ugh, no thanks, RPM files are underspecified crap,
incompatible between distros,

It's not RPM's fault that different distros have different *POLICIES* - not helped by the fact that SUSE (the second major user of rpm) actually PRE-dates Red Hat and rpm.

So it IS possible to retro-fit rpm to a completely different set of packages, because that's what SUSE did all those years ago :-) Dunno how easy that would be with deb, I'm unaware of any example where that's been done.

Cheers,
Wol

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 14, 2019 15:23 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (3 responses)

It's not a question of policy, it's a question of a file format that is somewhat unspecified, contains redundant fields, and is unnecessarily complex.

Contrast that with .deb which contains specific files in a specific format that's simple enough to be created and processed by generic archive packers (ar and tar) and shell scripts. (It actually was, in Debian's first iteration.)

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 14, 2019 15:37 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

>It's not a question of policy

Certainly a question of policy too given that does differ occasionally between even Debian and its derivatives causing incompatibility

> it's a question of a file format that is somewhat unspecified, contains redundant fields, and is unnecessarily complex.

I am not sure what any of this really means. Specific examples would help. Pick current ones instead of things solved ages ago please.

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 14, 2019 15:42 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

So, are you claiming that extracting debs or rpms using the equivalent of a rock lashed to a stick is something that is remotely relevant in the past 15 years of bootable USB sticks or the additional 10 years of bootable rescue CDs?

Or are you claiming that someone would ever be insane enough to _create_ a deb or rpm package using that same flint axe? Talk about not valuing one's own time...

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 23, 2019 20:06 UTC (Sun) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]

FWIW, I use the official .deb of a program as part of the “sources” in
another, resource-constrained, operating environment; it contains the
PDF compiled from Teχ sources (while that other OE does not have Teχ
available, but a PDF viewer, so the full documentation is usable)