Re: [Hampshire] Re:Application installers

> Ah! I was not aware that you were talking about a binary only
> distribution with some sort of license key.

We're not. We're talking about a binary distribution that needs to cover
32- and 64-bit distributions in .rpm and .deb format.

The .rpms are simple. They take no time flat to do.

The .debs are problematic; the two biggest issues are that the tools
aren't very bright[1], and the Debian Policy Manual seems to have some
fairly arbitrary rules[2] in there, not all of which can be ignored.

> With normal GPL/BSD open source, one simply creates an upstream source
> code release, and all the distros do all the packaging for you.

That's a cop-out. If a software distributor is incapable of packaging his
own code, then the packaging system is broken. And although we'd all love
every single piece of code in the multiverse to be Free, in reality that
is not how things are, and probably never will be. As such, distributing
binary-only[3] packages should not only be possible, but should not be
especially difficult.

The .rpm format does this easily. The .deb format is proving to be
troublesome.

Vic.



[1] For example, alien converts from .rpm to .deb, but the ensuing package
uses dependencies according to the state of the converting machine, not
the dependencies listed in the original .rpm. So suddenly, I need a much
newer version of libc than that used when the binary was built and
tested...

[2] Did you know that anything in /usr/share/doc over 4KB gets compressed?
I didn't. All my PDFs become .pdf.gz. But at least I can ignore that rule
if I choose.

[3] I'm actually having difficulty building source packages in .deb; we've
had to fork someone else's code (temporarily, I hope), and we've given it
a different name so that the changed functionality of our version doesn't
clash with the original. But AFAICT, debian source packages don't permit
either the pristine tarball or the diff tarball to carry a name different
to the resulting package - meaning I can't produce a source deb with a
properly pristine tarball. So I don't - the source package is shipped as
an rpm only.