Distribution-neutral packaging?

hotsauce · 2006-11-04 16:40:15

With all that recent talk about AUR's packages not being updated quick enough for some folk's taste and the new blog entry by Shuttleworth on distribution-neutral packaging, I was wondering what the arch community's pulse on the issue.

From an end-user's perspective, it really seems like it would make everything much simpler and productive to have some standards in packages that all distros should use. Added speed in package output, more versions of each package available, less doubling of work between every distros developpers, etc.

The point here is not to rehash the deb vs rpm vs pacman debate (i personally feel pacman's dependency check is incomparable, but for the rest, the user's experience is relatively similar across plateforms), but I would like to know what your idea is about the pros and cons of an idea like the one pushed in the article here:

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/66

Ciao

Vince

stavrosg · 2006-11-04 19:11:06

This should be a nice goal for the LSB-compliant distros, but the egos and the notorious Not-Invented-Here Syndrome(tm) of those involved will probably never make it happen.
On the technical side, for the high-level packages to work seamlessly, they need to be run against compatible libraries, a goal the LSB pursues, but was never, and will never be this distro's field of endeavor.

So no, I don't think this will ever affect arch.

hotsauce · 2006-11-04 21:01:48

stavrosg wrote:

On the technical side, for the high-level packages to work seamlessly, they need to be run against compatible libraries

But surely there would be a way to cross check installed libraries and pick the right package...

sarah31 · 2006-11-04 21:42:20

Across the board compliance with LSB will never happen. I like some of LSB and the idea of it but some of their decisions on what is and is standard is not well thought out.

Full complaince would pretty much eliminate huge numbers of distros which is good and bad. Bad because of the loss of innovation and creation of better standards and good because there is and has been for some time now WAY too much choice .... which hinders progress to some degree ... or at least slows it down. I am not convinced the baby steps Linux takes is goo or bad but how the talent is spread thin certainly eliminates big step progress for the most part.

Choice it great but too much is ... well .... not so great.

Gullible Jones · 2006-11-11 22:30:08

sarah31 wrote:

Full complaince would pretty much eliminate huge numbers of distros which is good and bad.

I'm actually not sure that standards would help that anyt. A lot of distros seem to be just clones of each other with different logos and default packages and differently arranged desktops, and perhaps more or less up to date repos.

iphitus · 2006-11-11 23:54:33

Impossible.

to do that would either a) require some stupidly ridiculously complex system people would not adopt because of it's ugliness.
b) require all distrobutions to compile the same versions of just about every shared lib. Now that isnt going to happen.

James

F · 2006-11-13 14:35:03

Isn't .tar.gz and/or tar.bz2 sort of "distribution-neutral" packaging anyways?

Arch Linux

#1 2006-11-04 16:40:15

Distribution-neutral packaging?

#2 2006-11-04 19:11:06

Re: Distribution-neutral packaging?

#3 2006-11-04 21:01:48

Re: Distribution-neutral packaging?

#4 2006-11-04 21:42:20

Re: Distribution-neutral packaging?

#5 2006-11-11 22:30:08

Re: Distribution-neutral packaging?

#6 2006-11-11 23:54:33

Re: Distribution-neutral packaging?

#7 2006-11-13 14:35:03

Re: Distribution-neutral packaging?

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