From: Massimiliano Mirra <list@...>
Date: 2002-01-12T23:05:15+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] rpkg 0.1 (long!)

On Sat, Jan 12, 2002 at 08:46:00PM +0900, Kero van Gelder wrote:
> OK, I never tried compiling dpkg for Windows (heck, I don't use
> Windows at all), but it can not be that hard? Given Debians
> philosophy, the source must be available somewhere...

They are, in fact.  I just wonder whether a few hundred lines of Ruby
that run anywhere out of the box are not preferable to some few
thousands lines that must be recompiled for each platform and make
changes and customizations hard.  By all means, go for it if you want
to try dpkg as a solution, I'll happily abdicate for it if it fills
all our needs.  I just want packages and a way to manage them, it
needs not be rpkg. :-)

> >Naming conventions are identical to dpkg, except that all dots but the
> >one preceding the extension are converted to underscores to avoid problems
> >under Windows.
> OK. Though it seems to me dashes would be better.

There should be no problem in changing to those.  The only issue would
be that we could not adopt revision numbers:
packagename_ve_rs_ion-rev_arch.rpk is rather computer parsable,
packagename-ve-rs-ion-rev-arch.rpk makes it hard to know whether there
is a revision number somewhere or not.

> This would have given a package that would not have run on 1.6.
> I am not sure packages can be created for 1.6 that do not run on
> 1.7, but I expect it will happen once 1.8 is out, or 2.0.

I see.  This is definitely an issue and deservers some thought.

> At this moment, I have more trouble with `make install` than with
> packaging, because my Ruby on PC (1.7.2) tries to put the arm libraries
> in the 1.7 i386 directory instead of the 1.6 armv4l.

> That is another way of making two different versions. It implies
> Depends: ruby1.7  instead of  Depends: ruby (>=1.7:2)
                                                     ^

Do you know what is this for?

> A small database can definitely be a choice. ipkg uses a database
> that is quite similar to dpkgs, but since it contains hundred packages
> instead of thousands, it is a lot smaller.

Has it got stripped down info texts for packages or are they full
infos, just less of them?

Massimiliano