Re: Unified Package Manager

[Christoph Lameter <clameter@waterf.org>]

Please keep the discussion in debian-private. This is highly speculative
stuff for developers only that might not have any real effect on Debian
for a long time. Dont reply to messages on debian-private on debian-devel!

On Mon, 13 Jan 1997, Andreas Jellinghaus wrote:

aj >I would like to see to more features with upm:
aj > - Find a way to include length any maybe md5sums or something like
aj >   that, so you can check that you have received the whole package, and
aj >   it didn't get damaged during transport. One look at the package
aj >   format didn't show me if there is something like that (if the pgp
aj >   signature is after %end, it could be lost. if a whole block in the
aj >   middle is missing also nobody will notice).

I could simply modify the %end and do a
%end [md5sum]. But I thought a pgp signature for each package would be
sufficient.

aj > - Some people will still not have upm, but want to use packages in upm
aj >   format without installing upm. .deb packages can be extract with ar
aj >   and tar.gz, if you know the syntax and .rpm packages might also be
aj >   extract-able by hand. In a German Linux newsgroup was a long thread
aj >   with many people having the problem, that they searched a program,
aj >   but only found .deb and .rpm packages, and didn't know how to extract
aj >   them. And they don't want to install a package manager. An easy
aj >   format or a small script included at the beginning of the file might
aj >   help.

That is not a problem. Just cut out the uuencoded sections and run them
through uudecode. Then you have to mess around with the files themselves.

aj >Packages are a big problem, but it cannot be solved from only one side.
aj >A good package manager will only solve some problems. The other side is
aj >the way of creating packages. You have some very fine things with
aj >debmake, so go on and combine the to be universal package manager with
aj >something like a universal package creator. 

debmake (and suidmanager) are in some respects trying to fix issues that
should properly be handled in the package managers. That is one of the
reasons for upm. debmake will certainly be developed alongside upm...

aj >you wrote that packages could be created with an editor, but i don't
aj >think this is the way to go. i like debmake, and an easy to use and
aj >transparent way to create packages with a good tool will be better than
aj >a simple way to create packages, without all that checking done by
aj >debstd.

Using an editor might be applicable to small packages or something
local you would do. Writing a package with an editor is very useful for
creating a meta-package that is needed on a couple of your local
machines and used to configure those machines without having to manually
install the same series of packages on each machine.
 
But using and editor is certainly not very useful for packaging up a
bigger package. debmake's job of processing stuff would be easier with upm
but debmake still must exist.

The ability to use an editor on the package file to fix small issues (like
a broken dependency, typo in installation scripts) is very important for
me. Also I would like to be able to review the installation scripts by
simply listing the package.

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