[indiana-discuss] what's next?

[Moinak Ghosh]

Simon Phipps wrote:
>
> On Jun 12, 2007, at 18:13, Jeff Abbott wrote:
>
>> Geoffrey Teale wrote:
>>
>>> Conary, as used by rPath and Foresight linux is also pretty darn 
>>> interesting, and explicitly designed to handle multiple derived 
>>> distros.
>>
>> Conary is very cool, and it's very different from other package and 
>> software management solutions.  That difference, however, is a 
>> double-edged sword in that it also brings new kinds of complexity 
>> with it, and requires most everyone involved learn a new set of tools 
>> and concepts.  Not that these costs necessarily outweigh the benefits 
>> of Conary -- or any other paradigm-shifting package manager -- but 
>> they do need to be considered.
>
> I'm not familiar with Conary. However, I'm aware that the burden of 
> preparing packages for multiple package management systems is a big 
> burden that consumes a great deal of time.
>
> Would Conary be sufficiently rich to be able to feed automated 
> generation of packages for other package management systems, so that 
> other distributions using different package management solutions could 
> auto-generate packages from the information used by Conary? In my 
> naivety it seems to me that the package management system for a 
> "reference" distribution ought to have this attribute.

   IMHO Package Metadata for whatever packaging system can be utilized by
   another packaging system. Just like Pkgbuild utilizes RPM Spec files 
to generate
   SVR4 packages, Nexenta utilizes SVR4 Pkginfo, prototype etc. files to 
generate
   Debs and NetBSD Pkgsrc can generate SVR4 packages from it's own metadata.
   Though this is not completely straightforward if you have scripts 
like postinstall,
   preinstall etc. in the package; But, certainly doable.

   This would be the prerogative of the distribution in question who'd 
decide to
   use a packaging system different from the base. A base cannot practically
   hope to produce and maintain packages for a variety of packaging systems.

   However Conary does look extremely interesting.

Regards,
Moinak.

>
> S.
>
> _______________________________________________
> indiana-discuss mailing list
> indiana-discuss at opensolaris.org
> http://opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss