On Wed, 19 Jun 1996, Chris Fearnley wrote: > But I like that the Debian source packages > can be untarred by anyone without dpkg and/or rpm installed.
I also think that's important. The source packages should be very simple, and the source unpacker/packer should be written in a scripting language. >From what I've gathered, the rpm format for sources is basically lines of text giving control information, followed by a cpio of all the gzipped tars. The control field gives commands to do things like unpack, build, etc. Because we already mandate commands for debian.rules, such complexity is not needed. This program (dsource?) would know that it just needs to run "debian.rules build" to build, "debian.rules dist" for a distribution, etc. The only information in the control field is how to unpack. Guy
