[lug] February 14th talk?

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 09:47:13AM -0700, D. Stimits wrote:
>unemployment time making a package tool, it would be a moduler OO
>design, with "plugins" for various file formats to output. I would be
>interested in knowing if the various package speakers see a common theme
>of describing input packages, the purpose being something like an

The python "Distutils" already does some of this.  A Distutils package has
a "setup.py" from which you can generate a source tar.gz, binary tar.gz,
RPM, Windows "installer" package, and others.  .debs aren't supported
because, as far as I can tell, Debian folks seem to believe that only
hand-packaged .debs should be created (not just included in the distro,
created period).  If the base package format doesn't include exactly the
set of values that Debian wants, it's totally useless.  That's the
impression I've gotten from speaking to Debian developers about it anyway.

I have heard that Debian is moving towards the "mini-RPM" format in the
future, which may make cross-platform packaging less of an issue between
RPM and DEB.

So, I think there may be some resistance to using it, but I'd love to see
packages be available for more and more distributions.  Except for
Slackware.  ;-P

Sean
-- 
 This message is REALLY offensive, so I ROT-13d it TWICE.
                 -- Sean Reifschneider being silly on #python, 2000
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
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