Universal package specification

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Eugene Gorodinsky <e.gorodinsky at gmail.com> [2009.11.29.2101 +0100]:
> > To remove redundancy, you'd have to remove the metadata from the
> > binary packages. That's surely doable, but would also mean that
> > a single .deb file would become useless: you could not obtain meta
> > data from it, and in particular, dpkg could not enforce policy and
> > prevent installation of packages with unresolved dependencies.
> >
> Yes, a single deb file would indeed become useless, but if the package
> has non-executable files it's usually split into two packages so it's
> kind of useless to have just one anyway. This is why I don't think the
> approach of having metainformation stored per-package is any good.
> Plus, if you want to let users be able to simply download using a
> browser and double-click a package to install it, you can create an
> "additional" format which would basically be a .tar that contains all
> the needed packages. Installing it would be the same as extracting all
> files into a temporary directory and then feeding the manifest to the
> package manager. It's also not cpu-intensive to create these tar
> archives on the fly, which would save storage space on the
> server-side.

Where does the package manager turn to obtain dependencies?

-- 
martin | http://madduck.net/ | http://two.sentenc.es/
 
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