RPMs and *.desktop files

[Sean Middleditch]

On Wed, 2004-03-03 at 14:15, Rob Kaper wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 10:40:17PM +0100, Julius Schwartzenberg wrote:
> > >^^^ It might not be a good idea to make rpm packages that try to work on
> > >multiple distros.  YMMV.
> >
> > I'm a little surprised by this. I thought one of the goals of these 
> > standards was to help making Linux distros and desktop environments more 
> > compatible with each other.
> 
> Desktop environments: yes.
> 
> Vendor implementations: no.
> 
> You can't force the Linux distributions, BSDs, Solaris and all the other

The RPM is platform specific, so non-Linux systems are pretty much out
of the picture in terms of packaging software.  You need to recompile
for different platforms no matter what.  (Compatibility layers aside;
other platforms don't even use RPM anyhow.)

> platforms supported by the desktops to have the same filesystem layout,
> binary compatibility, equal library versions.. any work in that area would
> be platform-specific, and as such inappropriate - at least for XDG/fd.o.

Library versions are supposed to be set upstream.  If a distribution is
explicitly breaking library versioning, they are flaming idiots, since
they are intentionally breaking compatibility, and bugs need to be filed
against their broken distribution.  (And for those upstream authors that
don't version things right, the same goes for them.)

File system hierarchy is the exact thing the spec (base dir spec) is
supposed to fix.  So hopefully the specs *do* get around that issue,
otherwise we have a problem somewhere.  ~,^

</idealism>

> 
> Rob
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.