[lug] mandriva 10.2 limited edition 2005

[David L. Anselmi]

D. Stimits wrote:
[...]
> I have no doubt about it that there are all kinds of deficiencies in 
> many packaging systems. I keep telling people about my big wish item: A 
> unified packaging language (not to be confused with UPS :P) that is 
> modular and extensible. If you could imagine all of the distros out 
> there, let's say that 90% of them suddenly had interchangeable packaging 
> and it didn't matter which one the package was developed for originally, 
> it all just fit together and worked...my belief is that it would trigger 
> a serious increase in linux packages and creations.

I think that you're looking at this as a packager, not as a user.  The 
problem isn't that we have many ways to describe a package but that we 
have many distros that a package needs to fit--if 90% of distros had 
interchangeable packaging then 90% of distros would be essentially 
identical.  You would remove the value added by the distro maintainers 
(somebody out there thinks that distro differences make SuSE or RH or 
Mandrake better than the others).

Jafo has some relevant comments at:

http://www.tummy.com/journals/entries/jafo_20050809_165341

from the paragraph "Why aren't RPMs transportable between 
distributions?" on to the end.

Dave