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Mailing List Message of <rpm-lsb>

Re: The state of LSB Packaging?

From: Denis Washington <dwashington@gmx.net>
Date: Thu 20 May 2010 - 11:34:01 CEST
Message-ID: <4BF50209.8010303@gmx.net>
On May 20, 2010, at 11:03 AM, Dominique Dumont wrote:
> On Thursday 20 May 2010 10:03:55 Denis Washington wrote:
>    
>> How does that sound?
>>      
> A bit like some ideas I have regarding packaging for ISV ;-) :
>
> http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2010/UniversalPackageForIsv
>
> I proposed this for Google Summer of code, but no student stepped up.
> These ideas are not well fleshed out, and I don't have time to work on them
> until probably 2011 (I'm mentoring another project regarding package config
> upgrade).
>
> Feel free to re-use what you want.
>    

Thanks for the pointer. Looks interesting, although the problem of 
merely defining a format, as lined out in the wiki page you linked to, 
is that support for that must be in the distros, which is somewhat a 
show-stopper as I explained.

However, it would probably be a good idea to define a package format 
after (if) the API is widely adopted, as a long-term solution. The 
obvious advantage of a specified format opposed to the API (which will 
have to always be there as an alternative, though, for cross-platform 
installers and the like) is that installing is more secure, as packages 
of that format would be verified and installed by the system with no 
dangerous third-party code running (provided only restricted scriptlets 
are allowed). The API, on the other hand, requires ISV-provided 
installer code which will most likely have to run as root (but that's 
the case with current installers not using the API, too).

All in all, a package format would be good for the future, but in the 
short run I'll concentrate on an API + metadata definitiion approach.

Regards,
Denis Wahsington
Received on Thu May 20 11:34:21 2010
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