[Rpm-maint] Re: [packaging] RFC: Berlin Packaging API

Dan Kegel dank at kegel.com
Wed Feb 27 23:12:01 UTC 2008


On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 2:44 PM, Jeff Licquia <jeff at licquia.org> wrote:
>  > First, I''m not sure I agree that anything like this is needed.
>
>  We had hashed this out in Berlin, and Ian's mailing list message
>  summarized some of the reasons for this.
>
>  Do you have any specific questions or objections about the need for it?

My main objection is that plain old packages rule,
and vendor-supplied installers suck.  Rather than
inventing something new to make vendor-supplied
installers integrate better into packaging systems,
we should make the existing packaging systems
work better for vendors.

We have some experience packaging Picasa and Google Desktop
for Linux.   We build it once, and then package it as both
.deb and .rpm.  Works great.
The only annoying part is that there's no easy way
to point our users at the right package to install.
That's a real problem, but I expect that a combination of
the Suse Metapackage idea plus PackageKit will take care of it.

Other than that, the existing packaging systems
are up to the task, and are far better than the
crufty installers provided by vendors.
- Dan

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/PackageKit
http://en.opensuse.org/Standards/One_Click_Install



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