On Jun 25, 2008, at 4:19 PM, Tim Mooney wrote:

> In regard to: Re: rpm3 package still exist, Jeff Johnson said (at  
> 3:25pm on...:
>
>> Modern == what has been widely deployed for 6+ years.
>
> Jeff, I totally agree.  The problem is, for better or worse, there are
> plenty of large commercial vendors that are still providing software
> that's been packaged with non-modern RPM.  It's the sysadmins that are
> the ones who suffer.
>
> I would love to see every vendor that distributes RPMs upgrade to
> something that's been released in the last couple years, but based on
> past experience with large vendors and what I've seen so far, that's
> not going to happen any time soon, even with customers pushing the  
> vendors
> to do so (and we are).
>
> As devzero points out, the even larger problem isn't what version the
> RPM is built with, it's how the software is packaged in the first  
> place.
> There are a lot of really bad vendor RPMs that do pretty crazy stuff.
>

You & I certainly have no disagreements.

FWIW, I'm in the late "pro-active" stages of eliminating "LSB Format"
packaging, at least that is my intent.

I publically offer assistance to any vendor who wishes to do
better than "LSB format" distribution for their *.rpm packages.

And I've also offered LSB assistance in upgrading to better than
the "LSB format" repeatedly.

I cannot solve the "LSB format" package problem within RPM source code
without introducing additional needless complexity. Already the code for
reading headers is far more tortured than useful, and most of
the reason is to accomodate multiple formats, including "LSB format",
transparently.

A deliberate & conscious change in plaintext definition cannot be  
handled transparently.

At this point, XAR is a better format, and is easier to achieve  
through engineering,
than continuing to pretend that "LSB format" can (or should) be  
supported.

None of this should surprise anyone: I've been saying the same things  
for
6+ years now. Only the bluntness of my tone has changed -- Enough  
already.

73 de Jeff