Package Management

["Greg Bell" <winston@atlantic.net>]

>It's a bad idea.  The idea of ANY new package format should be thrown out
>the instant it's conceived.  There's already WAY too many.  Also, such a
>system would be significantly CRIPPLED when compared with RPM.  It would
>have no dependancy checking, it would be incapapble of keeping track of
>what's installed, it would be incapable of deleting packages for you, you
>could never know which file belonged to which package, etc.
 This is wrong.  Rpms vaulted dependency checking is nothing more that
checking each
installed binary to see if the proper libraries are install (I forget the
command to do this
right off hand).  Additionally RPM cripples it's users by not allowing them
to install
packages other then RPM.  Let's face facts, if RPM were so great then there
wouldn't
be a DBM packaging system.  I have studied up on RPM vs TGZ packaging and
found both wanting.  The best bet would be to take what is good from what
exists and create
a better version.
  It would not be all that difficult, at the worst it would be a PERL script
at the best (my opinion only) it would consists of a shell script.  Before
everyone turns up their noses and
say, Oh that Bell, he's off on a tangent again, take a look at any of the
distributions.  Every one of them has a shell script to install/maintain the
packages that have been installed (yes even the dreaded tgz files).
RPM may, note I said may, be arguably the best of a bad lot (Which it seems
to me happens to a lot of *NIX software) but why settle.  If we are going to
do it, do it right.

        Greg