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Re: Is it time to abandon Dpkg?

On Tue, 24 Dec 1996, Craig Sanders wrote:

> On Mon, 23 Dec 1996, Bruce Perens wrote:
> 
> > > wow! go away or a few days and come back to find that the death of
> > > debian has been proposed (and by the project leader, no less!)
> >
> > Ahem. I was proposing the death of a package format, not the system.
> 
> yes, i know....but I believe that killing off the .deb format will
> ultimately and inevitably kill off the debian project.

That's exactly what I'm thinking. Just have a look at our FAQ (Version 22
Aug 96) at section 2.3:

2.3.  What's the difference between Debian and other Linux distribu-
  tions?

The Debian package maintenance system: [cut]
Open development: [cut]
The Bug Tracking System: [cut]

That's all we have to say about the differences. Now if we switch over to
rpm we have to remove the first point. I don't know about what Bug
Tracking System Red Hat has, but that's unimportant anyways since they
don't have an "Open development". So there would only one major difference 
between Debian and the other distributions: The open development.

IMHO this wouldn't be worth 120+ developers spending a lot of thier free
time.

So I think we should be absolutely carefully with this issue. If we just
drop ".deb" we loose the most important part of our identity and this
would IMHO lead to the end of Debian, which I think none of us would
like to hive (and I think Bruce wouldn't like that either). 

However, we might think of a way to further integrate other package
formats in our package frontend (that's dselect right now). I haven't had
a look at alien but I don't think it's integrated in dselect.

But for what would we need the compatibility with other formats, anyways?
The only argument that comes in my mind is that commercial software
packages would perhaps only be packaged in one specific package format
(that's rpm now I think). If we have "alien" now and integrate it into
a future version of dselect everything is fine. But there still remains
the big problem: Just unpacking the files would probably be not enough
since the startup files, crontab entries, etc. perhaps differ between the
distributions.

So I vote for keeping .deb, improving dselect and integrating "alien" in
the new dselect.

> > We either have to kill it off, or we have to light a fire under various
> > people to solve its problems.
> > 
> > We must question our deepest assumptions regularly, for the health of
> > the project.

But please be carefully with that.


Just my 2 cents,

Chris

--          _,,     Christian Schwarz
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