RPMs and *.desktop files

[Julius Schwartzenberg]

Mike A. Harris schreef:

>The best they will be able to do is to make something that tries 
>to be all things to all people, and ends up being not-quite-there 
>for anyone, as it would be next to impossible to package 
>something like X in a way that integrates properly in all OS's 
>out there.
>
>While some end users might find value in it, they're free to try 
>their hand at implementing it however, and I wish them lots of 
>luck.
>  
>
I have pretty good experiences with using packages not made for my 
distro actually. I've been using the XMMS RPMs from the XMMS website 
that are made for RedHat with SUSE for several years without problems 
for example. Also programs like VMware have a single RPM for all distros 
and that also has never given me any problems. The only annoyance there 
was with these was that there weren't any icons in the menu and these 
standards will probably even fix that problem :)
Many programs today also come in with single installer that works for 
all Linux distros (Mozilla, OpenOffice.org for example). I don't think 
there would be any problems when a RPM would be created that would 
install the same files as the installer package.
Only with big things such as XFree86 and KDE, I would expect there to be 
problems.

I'm packaging Dos and Windows applications with only a dependency 
Dosemu/Wine currently though, so they will probably work on any Linux 
system with a recent version of Dosemu/Wine.

Julius