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Re: call for code audit help
From: |
e.sammer |
Subject: |
Re: call for code audit help |
Date: |
Mon, 01 Jul 2002 10:22:35 -0400 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.1a) Gecko/20020610 |
Helge:
To start, thanks for the reply...
Helge Hess wrote:
Hi,
we also look into building a pkg management system for the GNUstep
environment. I had a quick look at your approach and it seems that you
are not basing your efforts on one of the existing pkg managers (eg rpm
or apt). May I ask why ?
This is *the* question I always get and not without good reason. There
are some nice package managers out there. Without getting too deep into
it (as it is off topic here) we didn't just write another wrapper around
dpkg or rpm because there were some basic parts of the way the packages
and system were built that just wouldn't really fit the standards of
these package managers. We drafted a design spec and then stuck to it
which meant we couldn't go with rpm - it didn't have the features and we
couldn't go with dpkg / apt because to add the features we wanted that
it didn't have (which were very few) would make it awkward. For this
project, we needed to make sure we had exactly what we wanted and (for
now) that meant a new package manager. The email I sent to the list
wasn't meant to spark a package manager / ports / rpm / dpkg / linux /
bsd war; I thought some people might want to take a look at the code and
offer up some suggestions.
Currently I tend to use rpm as the basis since it can manage multiple
databases on a single host, runs on multiple platforms, it is well
supported, quiet fast and - already provides a C library to process the
pkgs. So I would try to build an ObjC wrapper around that library (has
anybody done that before or wants to do this ?).
I thought a lot about doing this, but honestly, rpm has a bit of feature
bloat, in my opinion and it tends to make it more complex than it's
worth. I've been running SuSE for the last 5 years or so and the only
time I actually use rpm is during a new system install (after which I
just compile from source - it's easier most of the time).
What's also missing for rpm is the "red-carpet" functionality which I
definitly want to have.
Very very true. Debian, by *far*, has the best package manager in my
opinion and lspm was modeled after dpkg / apt in many ways. For our
purposes, we wanted something a bit different in implementation yet
similar in concept. Since many of the packages themselves would have to
be rebuilt for LinuxSTEP, by using an existing package manager we ran a
very high risk of people using a Debian package on a LinuxSTEP system
(something that could prove catastrophic in some cases). Lspm now has a
lot of the "red carpet" functionality (supports dependencies ala apt-get
and remote fetching from mirror sites all automagically) in the LSCore
framework making integrating package management into GS (or OPENSTEP /
MOSX) applications very easy. Lspm is really just a class cluster in the
LSCore framework - these classes are just "put together" to form the
basic command line tool.
Again, I'm sorry this got off topic. The original purpose was to give
the people who say "Where can I start?" or "How can I learn?" a place
and project to check out. Of course, taking advantage of the development
experience on this list also crossed my mind. ;)
Thanks again to all...
--
eric sammer <eric@linuxstep.org>
LinuxSTEP <http://www.linuxstep.org>
InterfaceWM <http://interfacewm.sourceforge.net>