Universal package specification

[Eugene Gorodinsky]

2009/11/30 martin f krafft <madduck at madduck.net>:
> also sprach Eugene Gorodinsky <e.gorodinsky at gmail.com> [2009.11.29.2119 +0100]:
>> How the distribution-specific packages are managed is entierly up
>> to those distributions. On the universal format side, the dbus
>> interface type can simply be added to the next version of the
>> format. Shared libraries can not be installed using the universal
>> package format, because that kind of defeats the purpose of
>> standardising on libraries. For DBus it's different.
>
> In that case, I am not sure I understand your proposal. I am sorry
> if I have hijacked the discussion a bit nonetheless.
>
> Do you think you can possibly conjure an example of, say, libfoo,
> a hypothetical library that offers its services to C/C++ programs as
> a .so file, and also has a dbus interface?
>
> How would the universal package spec for this library look like
> (approximately)?
>
> How *could* Fedora, Debian, and maybe Gentoo integrate those specs
> with their own package systems/formats? Don't worry if you don't
> know the details of the three, the general gist will do.
>
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Providing that the package
manager knows what distro-specific package provides which libraries
and which dbus interfaces and which third-party package provides which
dbus interfaces it's possible to resolve dependencies.

I used to think the distro-specific package formats would need to be
modified, but maybe not (since at least dpkg and rpm have virtual
packages, they could probably provide (and depend on) virtual packages
in the format of libraries:libfoo.so.1 or
dbus:org.freedesktop.DBus.Hello. I also thought that, in order for all
this to work the way it should,it should not be possible to install
shared libraries using the universal format. They can be installed
actually. As long as a third-party program or shared library interacts
with the system through other shared libraries (and providing that the
shared libraries ABI does not change), it can be guaranteed to work on
every compatible system.

> Thanks,
>
> --
> martin | http://madduck.net/ | http://two.sentenc.es/
>
> philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
>
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