Author: Steve Kemp Date: To: lug, Hampshire LUG Discussion List CC: Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Re:Application installers
On Thu Feb 21, 2008 at 12:57:48 -0000, Vic wrote:
> The .rpms are simple. They take no time flat to do.
Sure, unless you want to use them on Fedora Core, Centos, Mandrake,
etc. Releasing an .rpm for one distro is easy. Releasing one for
N distributions is doomed to failure.
> 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.
alien is a hack. It works a lot of the time, but there is no
sane way to convert from .rpm -> .deb and expect it to work.
> That's a cop-out. If a software distributor is incapable of packaging his
> own code, then the packaging system is broken.
No necessarily true. I could package my software as RPM files, but
I don't have a working RPM environment to do it within, or test
against. That means in practice I release a .tar.gz or .deb only.
> The .rpm format does this easily. The .deb format is proving to be
> troublesome.
