An attempt at improving cross-distribution software deployment: The Psys Library

[Michal Marek]

On 24.6.2010 16:12, Denis Washington wrote:
> On 24.06.2010 15:54, Michal Marek wrote:
>> On 23.6.2010 13:46, Denis Washington wrote:
>>> Cross-distribution software deployment on Linux remains to be a big
>>> problem. Basically, an independent software provider (ISV) has two choices:
>>>
>>> - Creating separate packages for every distribution (or, at least, every
>>>      
>> ...
>>    
>>> - Bypassing the package manager completely by deploying an executable
>>> installer which essentially just copies files.
>>>      
>> Even a distribution that does not use rpm for package management should
>> have the rpm command. So option 3 would be to provide just rpm packages
>> plus maybe a script to install them.
>>    
> 
> Do you mean rpm the program or a command with the same interface? Having 
> the former would not have any integration benefit to a simple executable 
> installer

Systems that use rpm would benefit from it, obviously :).


> If removing the package just involves removing the package's files (a 
> common case for a lot of end-user applications), then "rpm -e" will work 
> flawlessly (the installer informs the package manager about all 
> installed files with libpsys). The interface does currently not allow 
> installers to specify uninstall scripts, though this feature could be 
> trivially added if needed.

I consider this a bit dangerous, if the "official" uninstaller performs
other tasks than deleting files, these should be performed by rpm -e as
well.

Michal