Re: dpkg issues

[Christian Schwarz <schwarz@monet.m.isar.de>]

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On Thu, 20 Feb 1997, Bruce Perens wrote:

> From: Stuart Lamble <lamble@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au>
> > I'd really hate to see dpkg disappear, at least at this early stage of
> > the game.. especially given the amount of effort that has been put into
> > creating the Debian distribution, based around dpkg.
> 
> We should be asking orselves if "dpkg" is Debian. We have a good
> distribution, and changing package managers will not change that.
> We will have to give up a few of our present goals - for example
> we should be distributing the system as a suite of packages that all
> work with each other and are upgraded all at once, rather than upgrading
> a piece here and a piece there while we cross our fingers and hope the
> dependencies are right. That's the main thing we sacrafice in giving
> up dpkg. However, we give up a lot of headaches at the same time.

Did you have a look at the FAQ recently? In section 2.3 "What is the
difference between Debian and other Linux distributions?" there are only a
few points:

1. The   Debian  package   maintenance  system

2. Open  development

3. The  Bug Tracking  System

That's all! 

And now you are suggesting to drop dpkg? This would mean to drop the major
reason for anyone out there to use/develop Debian!

I wouldn't spend a second more on the project when the only difference to
the other distributions is the "open development" and the "bug tracking
system". If we switch over to rpm, then I'd suggest that we close the
project and install Red Hat ourselves. But this isn't an option to me.

Anyways, having two package systems out there is good, since both groups
(RedHat and Debian) will try to build the better one and this is an
advantage for the whole Linux community.

I don't think dpkg/dselect is bad. I fully agree to what Christoph said:
the problem ist that these packages are not being worked on. So what we
have to do is improve the dselect code so that other interfaces could use
it's functionality of dependency checking (this was one of the things that
come up a few days ago about the Tcl/Tk frontend to dpkg) and add a few
other features to dselect, like meta packages. But this is definitely
something that could be done. 

IMHO our main problem is that we have so many "egos". This results from
our "maintainer concept". I agree that we must have a responsible person
for each package, but for packages that are really essential for all
others, a single person making the decisions is not enough. We should have
a "dpkg Manager" that coordinates the changes and is mentioned as the
"maintainer", but there should be a team of debian developers working
together to improve the package system. Perhaps we should create a new
mailing list debian-devel-dpkg?

Again, I fully agree to Christoph but I'm certainly against dropping dpkg
since this would mean "loosing our identity".


Thanks,

Chris

- --          _,,     Christian Schwarz
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