standard dependancy system

[Patryk Zawadzki]

2007/12/11, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net>:
> Le Mar 11 décembre 2007 15:12, Patryk Zawadzki a écrit :
> > 2007/12/11, James Richard Tyrer <tyrerj at acm.org>:
> >> Yes!!!! You have correctly stated the problem which XDG needs to
> >> address
> >> and solve.  If 3rd party (commercial) applications are to succeed
> >> for
> >> Linux based systems, there must be a way for them to install on any
> >> system using at the most an RPM and a Deb package (or a Deb the can
> >> be
> >> converted with Alien).
> >
> > That's no problem, just depend on file names instead of package names
> > or compile statically.
> The infrastructure needed to rebuild packages for a set of
> distributions is not overly complex (if sources are well-behaved with
> automake-like magic). It's much easier to build different packages for
> different distributions than to try to produce one-size-fits-all
> packages.

What I meant in the above quote was programs that only come in
executable format with no sources provided. Actually a better way
would be to provide distributions with precompiled object files and
let us do the linking with proper versions of libraries but that is
prone to sniffing symbols.

> Distributions routinely build different versions of the same package
> for different releases. People like ximian used to produce different
> sets of packages for different distros. The OpenSUSE build service
> does the same nowadays.

Sure, I totally agree and that's what I was trying to point in the
part you didn't quote. Packagers already do a good job here and if the
process does not involve magic I can happily package software without
needing to read any part of the source code except for the
dependencies.

> The whole "there needs to be a way to produce universal packages" and
> "fragmentation will kill Linux or commercial Linux software" has
> always been completely false.

Totally agree.

-- 
Patryk Zawadzki
PLD Linux Distribution