A while ago I participated in a discussion here about the debian package format. Quite recently I tried to spark up a discussion about package formats on the LSB list but did not get any replies, hopefully this discussion will be more welcome here. Constructive crticism is welcome, so feel free to critique.
There is a sort of oligopoly in linux because of package management. There are several main distros which have a lot of package maintainers and a lot of packages as a result of this. Smaller distros need to choose between compatibility with existing packages and innovation (whatever that may be) - because creating and maintaining all of the packages you want to offer to the user is a very tedious task. This in turn limits the innovation these distributions could bring to the linux world and slows down the progress of Linux. A universal package format would benefit these distributions, since a lot less resources would have to be spent in order to create a new distribution. These small distributions will not be the only ones that benefit from this universal package format, big distributions such as debian will benefit from it too, because it will lift some weight off the maintainers' shoulders. Users of every distribution that supports such a format will obviously benefit from it since more software will be provided on their favourite distribution. And also ISVs will benefit from it, as it means less work for them to reach out to more users. However I'm not proposing to have a single true package format for all distributions. Rather my idea is to have a distribution-specific package format for packages that are distribution-specific, and a universal package format for packages that aren't specific. A lot of software applications, such as firefox, pidgin or openoffice do not require anything specific from a distribution like for example access to /etc/init.d/ files. Most simply require a certain library to be present or a certain dbus interface. This is what these packages really depend on, rather than the presence of other packages. Adding support for a universal package format will allow debian and other distributions to focus more on their real goals rather than on making packages from software which is already available on other systems. It will also allow distributions to make more invasive changes such as changing some functionality some other package may rely on, since currently, when two packages implement a certain interface other packages rely on, each of those packages has to have both of these packages specified in its dependencies. A transition from the current package format to the new package format could be gradual, with support for interfaces being added to the the distribution-specific package format first and then packages that do not rely on distribution-specific behaviour could gradually make a switch to the unified package format. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
