Packaging idea (Re: What next?)

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 6/2/05, Konstantin Ryabitsev <mricon at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. Don't bother and ship tarballs with a #!/bin/sh installer. Have
> some sort of an asinine custom updating mechanism, or none at all.
> 2. Create a long list for user to choose from:
>     * download this if you are running Suse 8
>     * download this if you are running Suse 9
>     * download this if you are running Fedora Core 2
>     * download this if you are running Fedora Core 3
>     * ...
>     ...which they rarely do, since they think it confuses users, 

So instead... you'd have every user download one fab that contained
ALL distro version specific packages? So instead of downloading 10
megs... i have to download 50 megs.. so i can have the suse and the
other fedora payloads shoved over the wire never to be used...
pointless.   I can't wait to see openoffice.org's single upstream
fap.. yippie for T3 connections!

They still need to create the distro specific repos for faps to work!
How about we focus on that first.. how about we get package venders to
start using repositories at all and providing .repo files at all.

> because some users only have a vague idea what distribution/version
> they are running. If the vendor ships kernel modules, then this list
> grows exponentially (see NVidia download page for examples). No
> updating mechanism available.

kernel modules.. are special.. dkms... hopefully in extras soon.  Can
we stick to ONE example please?

> 3. Create one RPM that statically links most things, and tries to work
> on anything by having horrendous staircases of %if-%endif, and by
> installing everything in /usr/local and hoping things still work. No
> updating mechanisms available.

And I dont think proprietary vendors are going to move away from this
at all.  The could be using .repo definitiosn right now ... they
aren't.


-jef