Re: [Hampshire] Re:Application installers

>> 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.

Cobblers. I build on Whitebox, and the .rpms run on RHEL, Fedora, CentOs,
Suse and Mandrake.

> 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 certainly appears to be true. So what do I do with the library files
where the Policy Manual prevents me from creating a source package without
some very inappropriate dibbling? What do I do when the dependencies
creating by building on my .deb system mean the binary won't run on my
RHEL system?

>> 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.

But you *could* create RPMs fairly easily by getting yourself a working
RPM environment. That you don't is your choice - and one to which you are
fully entitled - but it says nothing about the packaging system.

If you installed a working RPM system and it prevented you from building
RPMs, it would be broken. But that's not the case you're arguing.

>> The .rpm format does this easily. The .deb format is proving to be
>> troublesome.
>
> All depends on what you're used to I guess.

Familiarity is certainly a part of this - it's getting easier every time I
release - but it's not the whole of it. It does appear to be impossible to
build the source package I want without re-writing the tools (and even
then I'd have packages that don't meet "policy").

Vic.